Search Results
Discussion Paper
How Do Survey- and Market-Based Expectations of the Policy Rate Differ?
Over the past year, market pricing on interest rate derivatives linked to the federal funds rate has suggested a significantly lower expected path of the policy rate than responses to the New York Fed’s Survey of Primary Dealers (SPD) and Survey of Market Participants (SMP). However, this gap narrowed considerably from December 2015 to January 2016, before widening slightly at longer horizons in March. This post argues that the narrowing between December and January was mostly the result of survey respondents placing greater weight on lower rate outcomes, while the subsequent widening ...
Working Paper
A Unified Framework to Estimate Macroeconomic Stars
We develop a flexible semi-structural time-series model to estimate jointly several macroeconomic "stars" -- i.e., unobserved long-run equilibrium levels of output (and growth rate of output), the unemployment rate, the real rate of interest, productivity growth, price inflation, and wage inflation. The ingredients of the model are in part motivated by economic theory and in part by the empirical features necessitated by the changing economic environment. Following the recent literature on inflation and interest rate modeling, we explicitly model the links between long-run survey expectations ...
Working Paper
Inflation Expectations and the News
This paper provides new evidence on the importance of inflation expectations for variation in nominal interest rates, based on both market-based and survey-based measures of inflation expectations. Using the information in TIPS breakeven rates and inflation swap rates, I document that movements in inflation compensation are important for explaining variation in long-term nominal interest rates, both unconditionally as well as conditionally on macroeconomic data surprises. Daily changes in inflation compensation and changes in long-term nominal rates generally display a close statistical ...
Working Paper
A Unified Framework to Estimate Macroeconomic Stars
We develop a flexible semi-structural time-series model to estimate jointly several macroeconomic "stars" — i.e., unobserved long-run equilibrium levels of output (and growth rate of output), the unemployment rate, the real rate of interest, productivity growth, the price inflation, and wage inflation. The ingredients of the model are in part motivated by economic theory and in part by the empirical features necessitated by the changing economic environment. Following the recent literature on inflation and interest rate modeling, we explicitly model the links between long-run survey ...
Working Paper
Surveys of Professionals
This chapter provides an overview of surveys of professional forecasters, with a focus on the U.S. Survey of Professional Forecasters and the European Central Bank Survey of Professional Forecasters. A distinguishing feature of these surveys is that they collect point and density forecasts and make the data publicly available. We discuss their structure, issues involved in using the data, and the construction of measures such as disagreement and uncertainty at the aggregate and individual levels. Our review also summarizes the findings of studies exploring issues such as the alignment of ...
Working Paper
A Unified Framework to Estimate Macroeconomic Stars
This paper develops a semi-structural model to jointly estimate “stars” — long-run levels of output (its growth rate), the unemployment rate, the real interest rate, productivity growth, price inflation, and wage inflation. It features links between survey expectations and stars, time-variation in macroeconomic relationships, and stochastic volatility. Survey data help discipline stars’ estimates and have been crucial in estimating a high-dimensional model since the pandemic. The model has desirable real-time properties, competitive forecasting performance, and superior fit to the ...
Discussion Paper
Reconciling Survey- and Market-Based Expectations for the Policy Rate
In our previous post, we showed that the gap between the market-implied path for the federal funds rate and the survey-implied mean expectations for the federal funds rate from the Survey of Primary Dealers (SPD) and the Survey of Market Participants (SMP) narrowed from the December survey to the January survey. In particular, we provided explanations for this narrowing as well as for the subsequent widening from January to March. This post continues the discussion by presenting a novel approach called ?tilting? that yields insights by measuring how much the survey probability distributions ...
Working Paper
Expectations as a source of macroeconomic persistence: an exploration of firms' and households' expectation formation
While there is little question that expectations lie at the heart of much economic decision-making, and therefore at the heart of models of the macroeconomy that hope to reflect such decision-making, how such expectations are formed is an open research question. In earlier work, Fuhrer (2015) showed that empirical estimates of a standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model preferred inertia in expectations over price indexation or habit formation as a mechanism to explain the persistence of aggregate time series for output, inflation, and interest rates. A question left open ...
Working Paper
Are Long-Term Inflation Expectations Well Anchored in Brazil, Chile and Mexico?
In this paper, we consider whether long-term inflation expectations have become better anchored in Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. We do so using survey-based measures as well as financial market-based measures of long-term inflation expectations, where we construct the market-based measures from daily prices on nominal and inflation-linked bonds. This paper is the first to examine the evidence from Brazil and Mexico, making use of the fact that markets for longterm government debt have become better developed over the past decade. We find that inflation expectations have become much better ...
Working Paper
Intrinsic expectations persistence: evidence from professional and household survey expectations
This paper examines the expectations behavior of individual responses in the Survey of Professional Forecasters, the University of Michigan?s Survey Research Center survey of consumers, and the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters. It finds that the most robust feature of all of these expectations measures is that respondents inefficiently revise their forecasts, significantly underreacting to new information. As a consequence, revisions smooth through arriving information, and expectations forget past information at a rapid rate and appear to anchor to the unconditional mean or other ...