Measuring Inflation Expectations Uncertainty Using High‐Frequency Data

Inflation expectations play a key role in determining future economic outcomes. The associated uncertainty provides a direct gauge of how well‐anchored the inflation expectations are. We construct a model‐based measure of inflation expectations uncertainty by augmenting a standard unobserved components model of inflation with information from noisy and possibly biased measures of inflation expectations obtained from financial markets. This new model‐based measure of inflation expectations uncertainty is more accurately estimated and can provide valuable information for policymakers. Using U.S. data, we find significant changes in inflation expectations uncertainty during the Great Recession.     

A New Time‐Varying Parameter Autoregressive Model for U.S. Inflation Expectations

We study the evolution of U.S. inflation by means of a new noncausal autoregressive model with time‐varying parameters that outperforms the corresponding causal and constant‐parameter noncausal models in terms of fit and forecast accuracy. Our model also beats the unobserved component stochastic volatility (UCSV) model, one of the best‐performing univariate inflation forecasting models, in terms of both point and density forecasts. We also show how the new Keynesian Phillips curve can be estimated based on our noncausal model. Both expected and lagged inflation turn out important, but the former dominates in determining the current inflation.     

Long‐Run Inflation and the Distorting Effects of Sticky Wages and Technical Change

We show that the Calvo price‐setting model is not necessarily inconsistent with evidence of a weak relation between positive trend inflation and price dispersion. We identify the interaction between sticky wages and technical change as factors disrupting the allocative role of the wage system under positive trend inflation. In turn, this interaction generates inefficient wage dispersion, as opposed to price dispersion, which fuels inflation costs. We conclude that it is too early to dismiss the New Keynesian model as a useful vehicle to assess the costs of inflation.     

Measuring Inflation Anchoring and Uncertainty: A U.S. and Euro Area Comparison

We use several U.S. and euro‐area surveys of professional forecasters to estimate a dynamic factor model of inflation featuring time‐varying uncertainty. We obtain survey‐consistent distributions of future inflation at any horizon, both in the U.S. and the euro area. Equipped with this model, we propose a novel measure of the anchoring of inflation expectations that accounts for inflation uncertainty. Our results suggest that following the Great Recession, inflation anchoring improved in the United States, while mild de‐anchoring occurred in the euro area. As of our sample end, both areas appear to be almost equally anchored.     

News on Inflation and the Epidemiology of Inflation Expectations

This paper examines the nexus between news coverage on inflation and households’ inflation expectations. In doing so, we test the epidemiological foundations of the sticky information model (Carroll 2003, 2006 ). We use both aggregate and household‐level data from the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. We highlight a fundamental disconnection among news on inflation, consumers’ frequency of expectation updating, and the accuracy of their expectations. Our evidence provides at best weak support to the epidemiological framework, as most of the consumers who update their expectations do not revise them toward professional forecasters’ mean forecast.     

Trend Inflation and the Nature of Structural Breaks in the New Keynesian Phillips Curve

We show that with a unit root in inflation, the new Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) implies an unobserved components model with a stochastic trend component and an inflation gap. Our empirical results suggest that with an increase in trend inflation during the Great Inflation, the response of inflation to real economic activity decreases and the persistence of the inflation gap increases due to an increase in the persistence of the unobserved stationary component. These results are in line with the predictions of Cogley and Sbordone ( 2008 ), who show that the coefficients of the NKPC are functions of time‐varying trend inflation.     

Inflation Dynamics: The Role of Expectations

This paper estimates the Phillips curve allowing for a simultaneous role of rational and survey expectations. We consider both a reduced form and a structural specification of the Phillips curve. The results suggest that survey expectations can be a statistically significant component of firms' expectations and inflation dynamics. However, rational expectations continue to play a dominant role.     

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 private information and lifetime inflation experience. Life experience inflation has a significant impact on individual expectations, but only for 1‐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. Women, ethnic minorities, and less educated agents have a higher degree of heterogeneity in their idiosyncratic information, and give less importance to recent movements in inflation.     

Survey Measures of Expected Inflation and the Inflation Process

The accuracy of inflation forecasts obtained from household and professional surveys has deteriorated noticeably of late, to the extent that a simple autoregressive specification outperforms survey forecasts. The decline in (absolute and relative) accuracy has taken place at about the same time as an apparent change in the inflation process. Projections of household forecasts on realized inflation suggests that households have not recognized this change. For the professionals, projections of expected inflation on headline inflation have changed, but on core inflation have not. By contrast, projections of realized headline inflation on core have changed sharply.     

Inflation Expectations and Risk Premiums in an Arbitrage‐Free Model of Nominal and Real Bond Yields

Differences between yields on comparable‐maturity U.S. Treasury nominal and real debt, the so‐called breakeven inflation (BEI) rates, are widely used indicators of inflation expectations. However, better measures of inflation expectations could be obtained by subtracting inflation risk premiums (IRP) from the BEI rates. We provide such decompositions using an affine arbitrage‐free model of the term structure that captures the pricing of both nominal and real Treasury securities. Our empirical results suggest that long‐term inflation expectations have been well anchored over the past few years, and IRP, although volatile, have been close to zero on average.     

An Unobserved Components Model that Yields Business and Medium‐Run Cycles

We generalize the unobserved components (UC) model to allow the permanent component to have different dynamics than the transitory components when decomposing U.S. economic activity using a multivariate UC model of (log) output, consumption, and investment. We find that these proposed dynamics in the permanent component are statistically significant and distinct from those of the transitory components. Our approach provides an alternative explanation for the growth cycles identified by Comin and Gertler ( 2006 ) that is related to the cyclical movements in technology, in a framework consistent with the Beveridge and Nelson ( 1981 ) decomposition.     

Endogenous Price Stickiness,Trend Inflation,and Macroeconomic Stability

Previous studies show that higher trend inflation is more likely to induce indeterminacy of equilibrium in sticky‐price models based on micro evidence that each period a fraction of prices is kept unchanged. This paper demonstrates that when the degree of price stickiness is endogenously determined in a Calvo model, indeterminacy caused by higher trend inflation is less likely. A key factor for determinacy is the long‐run inflation elasticity of output implied by the New Keynesian Phillips curve. This elasticity declines substantially with higher trend inflation in the case of exogenously given price stickiness, whereas in the case of endogenous price stickiness the decline in the elasticity is mitigated because higher trend inflation leads to a higher probability of price adjustment.     

Inflation and Welfare in Long‐Run Equilibrium with Firm Dynamics

We analyze the welfare cost of inflation in a model with a cash‐in‐advance constraint and an endogenous distribution of establishments' productivities. Inflation distorts aggregate productivity through firm entry dynamics. The model is calibrated to the U.S. economy and the long‐run equilibrium properties are compared at low and high inflation. When the period over which the cash‐in‐advance constraint is binding is one quarter, an annual inflation rate of 10% leads to a decrease in average productivity of roughly 0.5% compared to the optimum. This decrease is not innocuous: it leads to a doubling of the welfare cost of inflation.     

Economic Literacy and Inflation Expectations: Evidence from a Laboratory Experiment

We present experimental evidence of a link between economic literacy and inflation forecast accuracy. The experiment investigates two channels through which economic literacy may enable better forecasts: (i) choice of information and (ii) use of information. More literate subjects choose more relevant information and use the given information more effectively. Starting from a 10th percentile score, the boost in literacy from taking an economics course predicts a 0.64 standard deviation decline in mean absolute forecasting error. Our findings suggest that a significant portion of demographic heterogeneity in inflation expectations—observed in survey data—may be driven by heterogeneity in economic literacy.     

Monetary Policy,Trend Inflation,and Unemployment Volatility

The literature has long agreed that the DMP model (after Diamond 1982, Mortensen 1982, Pissarides 1985) with search and matching frictions in the labor market can deliver large volatilities in labor market quantities, consistent with empirical data, only if there is at least some wage stickiness. I show, however, that the model can deliver nontrivial volatilities without wage stickiness, as long as it has price dispersion and nonzero long‐run inflation rates. I find that by keeping inflation at a positive rate, monetary policy may be accountable for the large standard deviations observed on labor market variables. In addition, the Shimer (2005) puzzle disappears under monetary policy shocks.     

What Makes the Output–Inflation Trade‐Off Change? The Absence of Accelerating Deflation in Japan

It is standard to model the output–inflation trade-off as a linear relationship with a time-invariant slope. We assess empirical evidence for two sets of theories that allow for endogenous variation in the slope of the short-run Phillips curve. At an empirical level, we examine why large negative output gaps in Japan in the late 1990s did not lead to accelerating deflation but instead coincided with stable, albeit moderately negative inflation. Our results suggest that this episode is most convincingly interpreted as reflecting a gradual flattening of the Phillips curve. We find that this flattening is best explained by models with endogenous price durations. These models imply that in any economy where trend inflation is substantially lower (or substantially higher) today than in past decades, time variation in the slope of the Phillips curve has become too important to ignore.     

Interwar Inflation,Unexpected Inflation,and Output Growth

Interwar macroeconomic history is a natural place to look for evidence on the correlation between output growth and inflation or unexpected inflation. We apply time‐series methods to measure unexpected inflation for more than 20 countries using both retail and wholesale prices. There is a significant, positive correlation between output growth and inflation for the entire period. There is little evidence that this correlation is caused by an underlying role for unexpected inflation. For wholesale price inflation in particular, the output declines associated with deflations were larger than the output increases associated with inflations of the same scale.     

Using Survey Data of Inflation Expectations in the Estimation of Learning and Rational Expectations Models

Does survey data contain useful information for estimating macroeconomic models? We address this question by using survey data of inflation expectations to estimate the New Keynesian model by Smets and Wouters ( 2007 ) and compare its performance under rational expectations and adaptive learning. The survey information serves as an additional moment restriction and helps us to determine the learning agents' forecasting model for inflation. Adaptive learning fares similarly to rational expectations in fitting macro data, but clearly outperforms rational expectations in fitting macro and survey data simultaneously. In other words, survey data contain additional information that is not present in the macro data alone.     

On the Instability of Long‐Run Money Demand and the Welfare Cost of Inflation in the United States

We evaluate the policy implications of measuring the welfare cost of inflation accounting for instabilities in the long‐run money demand for the United States over the period 1900–2013. We extend the analysis and reassess the results reported in Lucas (2000) and Ireland (2009), also considering the recent theoretical contributions of Lucas and Nicolini (2015) and Berentsen, Huber, and Marchesiani (2015). Breaks in the long‐run money demand give rise to regime‐dependent welfare cost estimates. We find that the welfare cost is about 0.1% of annual income over 1976–2013, as compared to 0.8% over 1945–75. Overall, these values are substantially lower than those reported in the literature.     

A Phillips Curve with Anchored Expectations and Short‐Term Unemployment

This paper examines the behavior of U.S. core inflation, as measured by the weighted median of industry price changes. We find that core inflation since 1985 is well‐explained by an expectations‐augmented Phillips curve in which expected inflation is measured with professional forecasts and labor‐market slack is captured by the short‐term unemployment rate. We also find that expected inflation was backward‐looking until the late 1990s, but then became strongly anchored at the Federal Reserve's target. This shift in expectations changed the relationship between inflation and unemployment from an accelerationist Phillips curve to a level‐level Phillips curve. Our specification explains why high unemployment during the Great Recession did not reduce inflation greatly: partly because inflation expectations were anchored, and partly because short‐term unemployment rose less sharply than total unemployment.