IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rba/rbardp/rdp2016-02.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Disagreement about Inflation Expectations

Author

Listed:
  • Alexander Ballantyne

    (Reserve Bank of Australia)

  • Christian Gillitzer

    (Reserve Bank of Australia)

  • David Jacobs

    (Reserve Bank of Australia)

  • Ewan Rankin

    (Reserve Bank of Australia)

Abstract

Average and median measures of inflation expectations can disguise substantial disagreement in expectations. Disagreement in expectations has important implications for anchoring of inflation expectations and central bank credibility. We use individual response data from five survey measures of inflation expectations to document five features of disagreement about inflation expectations in Australia: (1) there has been a decline in disagreement since the introduction of inflation targeting, except among consumers; (2) disagreement responds little to most macroeconomic news surprises; (3) disagreement among consumers is much larger than among professional forecasters; (4) disagreement and the mean level of inflation expectations co-move for consumers but not professional forecasters; (5) there appear to be persistent differences in consumer inflation expectations across different demographic groups. For professional forecasters, the reduction in the overall level of disagreement and unresponsiveness of disagreement to most macroeconomic news surprises is consistent with well-anchored inflation expectations.

Suggested Citation

  • Alexander Ballantyne & Christian Gillitzer & David Jacobs & Ewan Rankin, 2016. "Disagreement about Inflation Expectations," RBA Research Discussion Papers rdp2016-02, Reserve Bank of Australia.
    • Handle: RePEc:rba:rbardp:rdp2016-02
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/rdp/2016/pdf/rdp2016-02.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. N. Bloom, 2016. "Fluctuations in uncertainty," Voprosy Ekonomiki, NP Voprosy Ekonomiki, issue 4.
    2. N. Gregory Mankiw & Ricardo Reis, 2002. "Sticky Information versus Sticky Prices: A Proposal to Replace the New Keynesian Phillips Curve," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 117(4), pages 1295-1328.
    3. Alberto Cavallo & Guillermo Cruces & Ricardo Perez-Truglia, 2014. "Inflation Expectations, Learning and Supermarket Prices," NBER Working Papers 20576, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Christian Bayer & Falko Juessen, 2015. "Happiness and the Persistence of Income Shocks," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 7(4), pages 160-187, October.
    5. Bruine de Bruin, Wändi & van der Klaauw, Wilbert & Topa, Giorgio, 2011. "Expectations of inflation: The biasing effect of thoughts about specific prices," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 32(5), pages 834-845.
    6. Olivier Coibion & Yuriy Gorodnichenko, 2012. "What Can Survey Forecasts Tell Us about Information Rigidities?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 120(1), pages 116-159.
    7. Saten Kumar & Hassan Afrouzi & Olivier Coibion & Yuriy Gorodnichenko, 2015. "Inflation Targeting Does Not Anchor Inflation Expectations: Evidence from Firms in New Zealand," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 46(2 (Fall)), pages 151-225.
    8. Carlos Madeira & Basit Zafar, 2015. "Heterogeneous Inflation Expectations and Learning," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 47(5), pages 867-896, August.
    9. Christopher D. Carroll, 2003. "Macroeconomic Expectations of Households and Professional Forecasters," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 118(1), pages 269-298.
    10. Patton, Andrew J. & Timmermann, Allan, 2010. "Why do forecasters disagree? Lessons from the term structure of cross-sectional dispersion," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 57(7), pages 803-820, October.
    11. Ricardo Reis, 2006. "Inattentive Producers," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 73(3), pages 793-821.
    12. Carlos Capistr¡N & Manuel Ramos-Francia, 2010. "Does Inflation Targeting Affect the Dispersion of Inflation Expectations?," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 42(1), pages 113-134, February.
    13. Pagan, Adrian, 1984. "Econometric Issues in the Analysis of Regressions with Generated Regressors," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 25(1), pages 221-247, February.
    14. Ball, Laurence, 1992. "Why does high inflation raise inflation uncertainty?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 29(3), pages 371-388, June.
    15. Friedman, Milton, 1977. "Nobel Lecture: Inflation and Unemployment," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 85(3), pages 451-472, June.
    16. Ranyard, Rob & Missier, Fabio Del & Bonini, Nicolao & Duxbury, Darren & Summers, Barbara, 2008. "Perceptions and expectations of price changes and inflation: A review and conceptual framework," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 29(4), pages 378-400, August.
    17. Ulrike Malmendier & Stefan Nagel, 2016. "Learning from Inflation Experiences," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 131(1), pages 53-87.
    18. Lucas, Robert Jr., 1972. "Expectations and the neutrality of money," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 4(2), pages 103-124, April.
    19. Olivier Armantier & Wändi Bruine de Bruin & Julie S. Downs & Baruch Fischhoff & Giorgio Topa & Wilbert Van der Klaauw, 2010. "The effect of question wording on reported expectations and perceptions of inflation," Staff Reports 443, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Juan Camilo Anzoátegui-Zapata & Juan Camilo Galvis-Ciro, 2020. "Disagreements in Consumer Inflation Expectations: Empirical Evidence for a Latin American Economy," Journal of Business Cycle Research, Springer;Centre for International Research on Economic Tendency Surveys (CIRET), vol. 16(2), pages 99-122, November.
    2. Benjamin Beckers & Anthony Brassil, 2022. "Inflation Expectations in Australia," Australian Economic Review, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, vol. 55(1), pages 125-135, March.
    3. Dzmitry Kruk, 2016. "SVAR Approach for Extracting Inflation Expectations Given Severe Monetary Shocks: Evidence from Belarus," BEROC Working Paper Series 39, Belarusian Economic Research and Outreach Center (BEROC).
    4. Ruttachai Seelajaroen & Pornanong Budsaratragoon & Boonlert Jitmaneeroj, 2020. "Do monetary policy transparency and central bank communication reduce interest rate disagreement?," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 39(3), pages 368-393, April.
    5. Juan Camilo Galvis Ciro & Juan Camilo Anzoátegui Zapata, 2019. "Disagreement in inflation expectations: empirical evidence for Colombia," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 51(40), pages 4411-4424, August.
    6. Ali Inayat, 2023. "Household Inflation Expectations Uncertainty: A Case for Pakistan," Lahore Journal of Economics, Department of Economics, The Lahore School of Economics, vol. 28(1), pages 1-39, Jan-June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Alberto Cavallo & Guillermo Cruces & Ricardo Perez-Truglia, 2017. "Inflation Expectations, Learning, and Supermarket Prices: Evidence from Survey Experiments," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 9(3), pages 1-35, July.
    2. Olivier Coibion & Yuriy Gorodnichenko, 2015. "Information Rigidity and the Expectations Formation Process: A Simple Framework and New Facts," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 105(8), pages 2644-2678, August.
    3. M. Ayhan Kose & Hideaki Matsuoka & Ugo Panizza & Dana Vorisek, 2019. "Inflation Expectations: Review and Evidence," Koç University-TUSIAD Economic Research Forum Working Papers 1904, Koc University-TUSIAD Economic Research Forum.
    4. Tomasz Łyziak & Xuguang Simon Sheng, 2023. "Disagreement in Consumer Inflation Expectations," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 55(8), pages 2215-2241, December.
    5. Gaurav Kumar Singh & Tathagata Bandyopadhyay, 2024. "Determinants of disagreement: Learning from inflation expectations survey of households," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 43(2), pages 326-343, March.
    6. Antonecchia, Gianluca, 2023. "Heterogeneous expectations, forecast accuracy and firms’ credit demand," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 154(C).
    7. Andrade, Philippe & Le Bihan, Hervé, 2013. "Inattentive professional forecasters," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(8), pages 967-982.
    8. Alberto Cavallo & Guillermo Cruces & Ricardo Perez-Truglia, 2014. "Inflation Expectations, Learning and Supermarket Prices," NBER Working Papers 20576, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Conrad, Christian & Lahiri, Kajal, 2023. "Heterogeneous expectations among professional forecasters," ZEW Discussion Papers 23-062, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    10. Jarko Fidrmuc & Christa Hainz & Werner Hölzl, 2018. "Individual Credit Market Experience and Perception of Aggregate Bank Lending. Evidence from a Firm Survey," WIFO Working Papers 574, WIFO.
    11. Olivier Coibion & Yuriy Gorodnichenko, 2012. "What Can Survey Forecasts Tell Us about Information Rigidities?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 120(1), pages 116-159.
    12. Tsiaplias, Sarantis, 2020. "Time-Varying Consumer Disagreement and Future Inflation," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 116(C).
    13. Xu, Yingying & Chang, Hsu-Ling & Lobonţ, Oana-Ramona & Su, Chi-Wei, 2016. "Modeling heterogeneous inflation expectations: empirical evidence from demographic data?," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 57(C), pages 153-163.
    14. Olivier Coibion & Yuriy Gorodnichenko & Saten Kumar, 2018. "How Do Firms Form Their Expectations? New Survey Evidence," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 108(9), pages 2671-2713, September.
    15. Paul Hubert, 2014. "FOMC Forecasts as a Focal Point for Private Expectations," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 46(7), pages 1381-1420, October.
    16. Oleksiy Kryvtsov, 2005. "Information Flows and Aggregate Persistence," Computing in Economics and Finance 2005 416, Society for Computational Economics.
    17. James M. Nason & Gregor W. Smith, 2021. "Measuring the slowly evolving trend in US inflation with professional forecasts," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 36(1), pages 1-17, January.
    18. Binder, Carola Conces, 2016. "Estimation of historical inflation expectations," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 61(C), pages 1-31.
    19. Christopher Roth & Johannes Wohlfart, 2020. "How Do Expectations about the Macroeconomy Affect Personal Expectations and Behavior?," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 102(4), pages 731-748, October.
    20. Coibion, Olivier & Gorodnichenko, Yuriy & Kumar, Saten & Pedemonte, Mathieu, 2020. "Inflation expectations as a policy tool?," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 124(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    inflation expectations; disagreement; dispersion; information rigidity;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • 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

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rba:rbardp:rdp2016-02. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Paula Drew (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/rbagvau.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.