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The Term Structure of Expectations
Economic theory predicts that intertemporal decisions depend critically on expectations about future outcomes. Using the universe of professional survey forecasts for the United States, we document the behavior of the entire term structure of expectations for output growth, inflation, and the policy rate. We show that a simple unobserved components model of the trend and cycle explains the joint behavior of both consensus measures of expectations and the observed disagreement among individual forecasters. Importantly, univariate models of each variable are outperformed by a multivariate model ...
Report
The science of monetary policy: an imperfect knowledge perspective
New Keynesian theory identifies a set of principles central to the design and implementation of monetary policy. These principles rely on the ability of a central bank to manage expectations precisely, with policy prescriptions typically derived under the assumption of perfect information and full rationality. However, the challenging macroeconomic environment bequeathed by the financial crisis has led many to question the efficacy of monetary policy, and, particularly, to question whether central banks can influence expectations with as much control as previously thought. In this paper, we ...
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The term structure of expectations and bond yields
Bond yields can be decomposed into expected short rates and term premiums. We directly measure the former using all available U.S. professional forecasts and obtain the latter as the difference between bond yields and survey-based expected short rates. While the behavior of nominal and real short rate expectations is consistent with standard macroeconomic theory, term premiums account for the bulk of the cross-sectional and time series variation in yields. They also largely explain the yield curve's reaction to a host of structural economic shocks. This dramatic failure of the expectations ...
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Personal experiences and expectations about aggregate outcomes
We use novel survey data to estimate how personal experiences affect household expectations about aggregate economic outcomes in housing and labor markets. We exploit variation in locally experienced house prices to show that individuals systematically extrapolate from recent locally experienced home prices when asked for their expectations about U.S. house price changes over the next year. In addition, higher volatility of locally experienced house prices causes respondents to report a wider distribution over expected future national house price movements. We find similar results for labor ...
Report
Home price expectations and behavior: evidence from a randomized information experiment
Home price expectations are believed to play an important role in housing dynamics, yet we have limited understanding of how they are formed and how they affect behavior. Using a unique ?information experiment? embedded in an online survey, this paper investigates how consumers? home price expectations respond to past home price growth and how they impact investment decisions. After eliciting respondents? initial beliefs about past and future local home price changes, we present a random subset of the respondents with factual information about past (one- or five-year) changes and then ...