Perceived Political Bias of the Federal Reserve

Pei Kuang, Michael Weber and Shihan Xie

No 33071, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We conduct a survey experiment with a large, politically representative sample of U.S. consumers (5,205 participants) to study how perceptions of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s (Fed) political stance shape macroeconomic expectations and trust in the Fed. The public is divided on the Fed’s political leaning: most Republican-leaning consumers believe the Fed favors Democrats, whereas most Democrat-leaning consumers perceive the Fed as favoring Republicans. Consumers who perceive the Fed as aligned with their political affiliations tend to (1) have a more positive outlook on current and future economic conditions and express higher trust in the institution, (2) show greater willingness to pay for and are more likely to receive Fed communications, and (3) assign significantly more weight to Fed communications when updating their inflation expectations. Strong in-group favoritism generally amplifies these effects. Finally, if Trump were elected U.S. president, consumers would overwhelmingly view the Fed as favoring Republicans. The proportion of consumers viewing the Fed as an in-group would remain stable, but its composition would shift: Democrat-leaning consumers would see the Fed as less of an in-group, whereas more Republican-leaning consumers would perceive it in this way. Likewise, overall public trust in the Fed would remain steady, but trust among Democrat-leaning consumers would decline significantly, whereas it would rise among Republican-leaning consumers.

JEL-codes: D72 D83 D84 E31 E7 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-dcm, nep-exp, nep-mon, nep-pol and nep-soc
Note: AP CF EFG ME
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33071.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33071

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33071
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().