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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 ...
Report
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
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 ...
Report
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 ...
Working Paper
Learning and Misperception: Implications for Price-Level Targeting
Monetary policy strategies that target the price level have been advocated as a more effective way to provide economic stimulus in a deep recession when conventional monetary policy is limited by the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates. Yet, the effectiveness of these strategies depends on a central bank's ability to steer agents' expectations about the future path of the policy rate. We develop a flexible method of learning about the central bank's policy rule from observed interest rates that takes into account the limited informational content at the zero lower bound. When agents ...
Working Paper
Equilibrium Yield Curves with Imperfect Information
I study the dynamics of default-free bond yields and term premia using a novel equilibrium term structure model with a New-Keynesian core and imperfect information about productivity. The model generates term premia that are on average positive with sizable countercyclical variation that arises endogenously. Importantly, demand shocks, in addition to supply shocks, play a key role in the dynamics of term premia. This is in sharp contrast to existing DSGE term structure models with perfect information, which tend to rely on large supply shocks to generate timevariation in yields and term ...
Report
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 ...
Report
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 ...
Working Paper
Drifting Inflation Targets and Monetary Stagflation
This paper revisits the phenomenon of stagflation. Using a standard New Keynesian dynamic, stochastic general equilibrium model, we show that stagflation from monetary policy alone is a very common occurrence when the economy is subject to both deviations from the policy rule and a drifting inflation target. Once the inflation target is fixed, the incidence of stagflation in the baseline model is essentially eliminated. In contrast with several other recent papers that have focused on the connection between monetary policy and stagflation, we show that while high uncertainty about monetary ...