Search Results
Working Paper
The Effect of Local Economic Shocks on Local and National Elections
We study the reaction of voters to shifts in local economic conditions. Using the departure from the gold standard of US trading partners in 1931 and the US in 1933, we exploit heterogeneity in export destinations, creating local differences in expenditure-switching in US counties by isolating the aggregate effects of the monetary shocks using time fixed effects. We find significant changes in local voting behavior in response to both shocks, one originating abroad, and another domestically. The response to both shocks have similar magnitude. We argue that voters punished and rewarded ...
Working Paper
Low Passthrough from Inflation Expectations to Income Growth Expectations: Why People Dislike Inflation
Using a novel experimental setup, we study the direction of causality between consumers’ inflation expectations and their income growth expectations. In a large, nationally representative survey of US consumers, we find that the rate of passthrough from expected inflation to expected income growth is incomplete, on the order of 20 percent. There is no statistically significant effect going in the other direction. Passthrough varies systematically with demographic and socioeconomic factors, with greater passthrough for higher-income individuals than lower-income individuals, although it is ...
Journal Article
Understanding Which Prices Affect Inflation Expectations
Inflation expectations have an impact on one’s economic behavior. We show that the inflation expectations of professional forecasters and consumers are predicted by very different prices. While professional forecasters weigh prices similar to the consumer price index, consumers seem to focus on prices they see more often, such as those for food and new vehicles. These are also prices that have seen disproportionally high volatility since the onset of the pandemic. We argue that heterogeneity in the importance of component-specific inflation can have relevant economic implications and ...
Working Paper
Aggregate Implications of Heterogeneous Inflation Expectations: The Role of Individual Experience
We show that inflation expectations are heterogeneous and depend on past individual experiences. We propose a diagnostic expectations-augmented Kalman filter to represent consumers’ heterogeneous inflation expectations-formation process, where heterogeneity comes from an anchoring-to-the-past mechanism. We estimate the diagnosticity parameter that governs the inflation expectations-formation process and show that the model can replicate systematic differences in inflation expectations across cohorts in the US. We introduce this mechanism into a New Keynesian model and find that ...
Working Paper
The Effects of Interest Rate Increases on Consumers' Inflation Expectations: The Roles of Informedness and Compliance
We study how monetary policy communications associated with increasing the federal funds rate causally affect consumers' inflation expectations. In a large-scale, multi-wave randomized controlled trial (RCT), we find weak evidence on average that communicating policy changes lowers consumers' medium-term inflation expectations. However, information differs systematically across demographic groups, in terms of ex ante informedness about monetary policy and ex post compliance with the information treatment. Monetary policy communications have a much stronger effect on people who had not ...
Working Paper
The Effects of Interest Rate Increases on Consumers' Inflation Expectations: The Roles of Informedness and Compliance
We study how monetary policy communications associated with increasing the federal funds rate causally affect consumers' inflation expectations in real time. In a large-scale, multi-wave randomized controlled trial (RCT), we find weak evidence that communicating these policy changes lowers consumers' medium-term inflation expectations on average. However, information differs systematically across demographic groups, in terms of ex ante informedness about monetary policy and ex post compliance with the information treatment. Monetary policy communications have a much stronger effect on the ...
Working Paper
Low Passthrough from Inflation Expectations to Income Growth Expectations: Why People Dislike Inflation
We implement a novel methodology to disentangle two-way causality in inflation and income expectations in a large, nationally representative survey of US consumers. We find a 20 percent passthrough from expected inflation to expected income growth, but no statistically significant effect in the other direction. Passthrough is higher for higher-income individuals and men. Higher inflation expectations increase consumers’ likelihood to search for higher-paying new jobs. In a calibrated search-and-matching model, dampened responses of wages to demand and supply shocks translate into greater ...
Working Paper
The Geographic Effects of Monetary Policy
We study the differential regional effects of monetary policy exploiting geographical heterogeneity in income across cities in the United States. We find that prices and employment in poorer cities react more to monetary policy shocks. The results for prices hold for a wide range of narrow consumer expenditure categories. The results are consistent with New Keynesian models that allow for a differential share of hand-to-mouth consumers across regions, but not with models in which regions have different slopes of the Phillips curve. We show that an increase in heterogeneity across cities ...
Working Paper
The Expectations of Others
Based on a framework of memory and recall that accounts for social networks, we provide conditions under which social networks can amplify expectations. We provide evidence for several predictions of the model using a novel dataset on inflation expectations and social network connections: Inflation expectations in the social network are statistically significantly, positively associated with individual inflation expectations; the relationship is stronger for groups that share common demographic characteristics, such as gender, income, or political affiliation. An instrumental variable ...
Journal Article
Indirect Consumer Inflation Expectations
Surveys often measure consumers’ inflation expectations by asking directly about prices in general or overall inflation, concepts that may not be well-defined for some individuals. In this Commentary, we propose a new, indirect way of measuring consumer inflation expectations: Given consumers’ expectations about developments in prices of goods and services during the next 12 months, we ask them how their incomes would have to change to make them equally well-off relative to their current situation such that they could buy the same amount of goods and services as they can today. Using a ...