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Inflation Disagreement Weakens the Power of Monetary Policy

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Abstract

Households often disagree in their inflation outlooks. We present novel empirical evidence that inflation disagreement weakens the power of forward guidance and conventional monetary policy. These empirical observations can be rationalized by a model featuring heterogeneous beliefs about the central banks’ inflation target. An agent who perceives higher future inflation also perceives a lower real interest rate and thus would like to borrow more to finance consumption, subject to borrowing constraints. Higher inflation disagreement would lead to a larger share of borrowing-constrained agents, resulting in more sluggish responses of aggregate consumption to changes in both current and expected future interest rates. This mechanism also provides a microeconomic foundation for Euler equation discounting that helps resolve the forward guidance puzzle.

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  • Ding Dong & Zheng Liu & Pengfei Wang & Min Wei, 2024. "Inflation Disagreement Weakens the Power of Monetary Policy," Working Paper Series 2024-27, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
  • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedfwp:98689
    DOI: 10.24148/wp2024-27
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    inflation uncertainty and disagreement; inflation expectations; heterogeneous beliefs; borrowing constraints; monetary policy; forward guidance;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
    • E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy
    • E71 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on the Macro Economy

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