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Discussion Paper
What Drives Forecaster Disagreement about Monetary Policy?
What can disagreement teach us about how private forecasters perceive the conduct of monetary policy? In a previous post, we showed that private forecasters disagree about both the short-term and the long-term evolution of key macroeconomic variables but that the shape of this disagreement differs across variables. In contrast to their views on other macroeconomic variables, private forecasters disagree substantially about the level of the federal funds rate that will prevail in the medium to long term but very little on the rate at shorter horizons. In this post, we explore the possible ...
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Heterogeneous inflation expectations and learning
Using the panel component of the Michigan Survey of Consumers, we estimate a learning model of inflation expectations, allowing for heterogeneous use of both private information and lifetime inflation experience. ?Life-experience inflation? has a significant impact on individual expectations, but only for one-year-ahead inflation. Public information is substantially more relevant for longer-horizon expectations. Even controlling for life-experience inflation and public information, idiosyncratic information explains a nontrivial proportion of the inflation forecasts of agents. We find that ...
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Fundamental disagreement
We use the term structure of disagreement of professional forecasters to document a novel set of facts: (1) forecasters disagree at all horizons, including the long run; (2) the term structure of disagreement differs markedly across variables: it is downward sloping for real output growth, relatively flat for inflation, and upward sloping for the federal funds rate; (3) disagreement is time-varying at all horizons, including the long run. These new facts present a challenge to benchmark models of expectation formation based on informational frictions. We show that these models require two ...
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Fitting observed inflation expectations
This paper provides evidence on the extent to which inflation expectations generated by a standard Christiano et al. (2005)/Smets and Wouters (2003)?type DSGE model are in line with what is observed in the data. We consider three variants of this model that differ in terms of the behavior of, and the public?s information on, the central banks? inflation target, allegedly a key determinant of inflation expectations. We find that: 1) time-variation in the inflation target is needed to capture the evolution of expectations during the post-Volcker period; 2) the variant where agents have ...
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The FRBNY staff underlying inflation gauge: UIG
Monetary policymakers and long-term investors would benefit greatly from a measure of underlying inflation that uses all relevant information, is available in real time, and forecasts inflation better than traditional underlying inflation measures such as core inflation measures. This paper presents the ?FRBNY Staff Underlying Inflation Gauge (UIG)? for CPI and PCE. Using a dynamic factor model approach, the UIG is derived from a broad data set that extends beyond price series to include a wide range of nominal, real, and financial variables. It also considers the specific and time-varying ...