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This thesis investigates the dynamics of inflation expectations with a particular focus on survey data. It aims to further the understanding of what drives inflation expectations and what are the implications of changes in inflation expectations for economic choices. The first chapter examines to what extent monetary policy moves household inflation expectations. More specifically, I study the effect of different types of monetary policy announcements on household inflation expectations based on micro data from a survey of German households. As unique feature, interviews of the survey were conducted both shortly before and after monetary policy events. This timing provides a natural experiment to identify the immediate effects of policy announcements on household inflation expectations. In contrast to most existing studies, the availability of the survey over a period of 15 years also allows me to exploit the time-series dimension to estimate how policy announcements affect household inflation expectations over the medium-term. I find that policy rate announcements lead to quick and significant adjustments in household inflation expectations with the effect peaking after half a year. Announcements about forward guidance and quantitative easing, on the other hand, have only small and delayed effects. My results suggest that monetary policy announcements can influence household expectations but further improvements in communication seem to be necessary to reach the general public more effectively. In particular, in an environment where policy rates are constrained by the effective lower bound, it may be very hard for central banks to influence household expectations. In the second chapter, joint with Evi Pappa and Alejandro Vicondoa, we focus on expectations about inflation in the medium to long run and study the implications of changes in these expectations for households' economic choices. We identify in a SVAR shocks that best explain future movements in different measures of underlying inflation at a five-year horizon and label them as news augmented shocks to underlying inflation. Independently of the measure used, such shocks raise the nominal rate and inflation persistently, while they induce mild and short-lived increases in economic activity. The extracted inflation shocks have differential distributional effects. They increase significantly and persistently the consumption of mortgagors and homeowners. Differently from the traditional monetary policy disturbances, news augmented shocks to underlying inflation induce a positive wealth effect for mortgagors and homeowners, driven by a reduction in the real mortgage payments and a persistent increase in real house prices that they induce. The third chapter, joint with Jonas Fisher and Leonardo Melosi, is also about long-run inflation expectations but in this case the focus is on professional forecasters. We use panel data from the U.S. Survey of Professional Forecasters to estimate a model of individual forecaster behavior in an environment where inflation follows a trend-cycle time series process. Our model allows us to estimate the sensitivity of forecasters' long-run expectations to incoming inflation and news about future inflation, and measure the coordination of beliefs about future inflation. We use our model of individual forecasters to study average long-run inflation expectations. Short term changes in inflation have small effects on average expectations; the sensitivity to news is over twice as large, but is still relatively small. These findings provide a partial explanation for why the anchoring and subsequent de-anchoring of average inflation expectations over 1991 to 2020 were such long-lasting episodes. Our model suggests coordination of beliefs also played a role, slowing down but not preventing the pull on average expectations from inflation running persistently below target. We apply our model to the case of a U.S. central banker setting policy in September 2021. Our results suggest the high inflation readings of mid-2021 would have to be followed by overshooting of the Fed's target generally at the high end of the Fed's Summary of Economic Projections to re-anchor long term expectations at their pre-Great Recession level.
Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.
My dissertation studies and quantifies the implications of various expectations formation processes for what concerns macroeconomic fluctuations and monetary policy transmission. The first chapter (joint work with Marco Airaudo) studies the existence of Stochastic Consistent Expectations Equilibria (SCEE) in linear Markov regime switching models. A SCEE exists when the model-implied mean and first order autocorrelation coincide with those predicted by the agents via misspecified forecasting rules. For a simple regime-switching monetary policy model, the parametric space where at least one SCEE exists is rather wide, and may extend well beyond the rational expectations equilibrium determinacy frontier. Misspecified expectations combined with regime-switching yield a strong endogenous amplification mechanism that help generate the near unit root dynamics for inflation observed in the U.S. before the Great Moderation. The second chapter considers a New Keynesian model in which agents form expectations based on a combination of misspecified forecasts and myopia. The proposed expectations formation process is tested against Rational Expectations (RE), as well other assumptions about expectations, with inflation forecasting data from the U.S. Survey of Professional Forecasters. The paper then derives the general equilibrium solution consistent with the proposed expectations formation process and estimates the model with likelihood-based Bayesian methods. The paper yields three novel results: (i) Datastrongly prefer the combination of autoregressive misspecified forecasting rules and myopia over other alternatives, including RE; (ii) The best fitting expectations formation process for both households and firms is characterized by high degrees of myopia and simple AR(1) forecasting rules; (iii) Despite the absence of real rigidities typically found necessary for New Keynesian models with RE, the estimated model with autoregressive forecasts and myopia generates substantial internal persistence and amplification to exogenous shocks. The third chapter proves that in Full-Information RE models with exogenous Markov regime shifts, ex-post regime-dependent forecasting errors can be described by available information at the time of forecast and ex-ante forecasting revisions, separately. In economic environments with structural changes, the FIRE hypothesis gives rise to waves of over-and under-response of forecasters to current events as well as new aggregate information at the time of forecast. Using inflation and output growth forecasting data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters, the paper presents new evidence of such waves, consistent with implications of Full-Information RE in models with regime shifts. Finally, the framework and insights are generalized to any dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with exogenous Markov shifts, whose RE solution can be written as a Markov Switching VAR process.
This paper investigates the role that imperfect knowledge about the structure of the economy plays in the formation of expectations, macroeconomic dynamics, and the efficient formulation of monetary policy. Economic agents rely on an adaptive learning technology to form expectations and to update continuously their beliefs regarding the dynamic structure of the economy based on incoming data. The process of perpetual learning introduces an additional layer of dynamic interaction between monetary policy and economic outcomes. We find that policies that would be efficient under rational expectations can perform poorly when knowledge is imperfect. In particular, policies that fail to maintain tight control over inflation are prone to episodes in which the public's expectations of inflation become uncoupled from the policy objective and stagflation results, in a pattern similar to that experienced in the United States during the 1970s. Our results highlight the value of effective communication of a central bank's inflation objective and of continued vigilance against inflation in anchoring inflation expectations and fostering macroeconomic stability.
Abstract: My dissertation grapples with the issues of model uncertainty in macroeconomics, and analyzes its consequences for monetary policy. It consists of three essays. In the first essay (Chapter 1), "Monetary Policy under Misspecified Expectations", I examine policy choices for the central bank that faces uncertainty about the process of expectation formation by economic agents. The economy contains both "rule-of-thumb" agents who base their expectations on recent observations and agents who have rational expectations. The central bank is uncertain about the fraction of the rule-of-thumb agents. This uncertainty concern enables me to partially rationalize the over cautious policy stance of the Fed: empirically observed policy in the past two decades involves much weaker responses than optimal policies derived from various micro-founded models. It is well understood that when the economy is more forward-looking, the central bank displays more aggressive responses to inflation and output. But the uncertainty-averse central bank evaluates policies by the performance in the worst case. In my economy this has a high fraction of agents that are backward-looking. The best policy the central bank chooses thus involves moderate responses. That is to say, this minimax policy moves closer toward actual less responsive policy. In the second essay (Chapter 2), "Phillips Curve Uncertainty and Monetary Policy", I investigate the effect of model uncertainty on policy choices employing a more general approach, which nests the minimax and Bayesian approaches as limiting cases. The central bank is uncertain about whether the economy has a sticky price Phillips curve or a sticky information Phillips curve. I argue that how the central bank chooses a policy depends both on its perception of uncertainty environment and on its attitude towards uncertainty. I find that as the central bank either becomes more uncertainty-averse or considers sticky information more plausible, the response to inflation decreases and to output increases. The third essay (Chapter 3) is entitled "Optimal Simple Rules in RE Models with Risk Sensitive Preferences". This paper provides a useful method to solve optimal simple rules under risk sensitive preference in macro models with forward looking behavior. An application to a new Keynesian model with lagged dynamics is offered and risk sensitive preference is found to amplify policy responses.