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Journal Article
Consumers and COVID-19: Survey Results on Mask-Wearing Behaviors and Beliefs
Masks or cloth face coverings have the potential to help reduce the spread of COVID-19 without greatly disrupting economic activity if they are widely used. To assess the state of mask wearing, we surveyed US consumers about their recent and prospective mask-wearing behavior. We find that most respondents are wearing masks in public but that some respondents are less likely to follow social-distancing guidelines while doing so, indicating a potential tradeoff between two of the recommended methods that jointly reduce coronavirus transmission. While most respondents indicated that they were ...
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 ...
Working Paper
Average Inflation Targeting and Household Expectations
Using a daily survey of U.S. households, we study how the Federal Reserve’s announcement of its new strategy of average inflation targeting affected households’ expectations. Starting with the day of the announcement, there is a very small uptick in the minority of households reporting that they had heard news about monetary policy relative to prior to the announcement, but this effect fades within a few days. Those hearing news about the announcement do not seem to have understood the announcement: they are no more likely to correctly identify the Fed’s new strategy than others, nor ...
Journal Article
When Might the Federal Funds Rate Lift Off? Computing the Probabilities of Crossing Unemployment and Inflation Thresholds
The Federal Open Market Committee has been providing guidance to help markets anticipate when it will begin raising the federal funds rate target. The most recent guidance suggests that the target will not change at least until after an unemployment or infl ation threshold is breached. We use a forecasting model to estimate when these thresholds are likely to be breached. We also consider how an infl ation fl oor would affect the timing of liftoff.
Working Paper
Real-Time Density Nowcasts of US Inflation: A Model-Combination Approach
We develop a flexible modeling framework to produce density nowcasts for US inflation at a trading-day frequency. Our framework: (1) combines individual density nowcasts from three classes of parsimonious mixed-frequency models; (2) adopts a novel flexible treatment in the use of the aggregation function; and (3) permits dynamic model averaging via the use of weights that are updated based on learning from past performance. Together these features provide density nowcasts that can accommodate non-Gaussian properties. We document the competitive properties of the nowcasts generated from our ...
Working Paper
Indirect Consumer Inflation Expectations: Theory and Evidence
Based on indirect utility theory, we introduce a novel methodology of measuring inflation expectations indirectly. This methodology starts at the individual level, asking consumers about the change in income required to buy the same amounts of goods and services one year ahead. Analytically, our methodology possesses smaller ex-post aggregate inflation forecast errors relative to forecasts based on conventional survey questions. We ask this question in a large-scale, high-frequency survey of consumers in the US and 14 countries, and we show that indirect consumer inflation expectations ...
Journal Article
Inflation: Drivers and Dynamics | 2019 CEBRA Annual Meeting Session Summary
The relationship between the Phillips curve and inflation has become weaker over time, producing questions regarding how policymakers might connect inflation to the rest of the economy. Presentations given during the “Inflation: Drivers and Dynamics” session of the Central Bank Research Association’s annual meeting focused on the intersection of monetary policy and inflation dynamics to examine the ways in which policy might impact inflation and related expectations and processes. This Economic Commentary summarizes the papers presented during this session.
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 ...
Journal Article
A Real-Time Assessment of Inflation Nowcasting at the Cleveland Fed
Using a model based on staff research, the Cleveland Fed’s website provides daily nowcasts—or near-term predictions—of multiple US inflation measures for public use. In this Commentary, we compare the historical predictive accuracy of the model behind those inflation nowcasts with the accuracy of inflation nowcasts coming from competing sources: surveys of professional forecasters and alternative statistical models. We find that our inflation nowcasts have performed relatively well in these comparisons, both over a long sample and a short sample that focuses on the period since the ...