Perceived Inflation Persistence

Monica Jain

Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada

Abstract: The Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) has had vast influence on research related to better understanding expectation formation and the behaviour of macroeconomic agents. Inflation expectations, in particular, have received a great deal of attention, since they play a crucial role in determining real interest rates, the expectations-augmented Phillips curve and monetary policy. One feature of the SPF that has surprisingly not been explored is the natural way in which it can be used to extract useful measures of inflation persistence. This paper presents a new measure of U.S. inflation persistence from the point of view of a professional forecaster, referred to as perceived inflation persistence. It is built via the implied autocorrelation function that follows from the estimates obtained using a forecaster-specific state-space model. Findings indicate that perceived inflation persistence has changed over time and that forecasters are more likely to view unexpected shocks to inflation as transitory, particularly since the mid-1990s. When compared to the autocorrelation function for actual inflation, forecasters react less to shocks than the actual inflation data would suggest, since they may engage in forecast smoothing.

Keywords: Inflation and prices; Econometric and statistical methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E31 E37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-for, nep-mac and nep-mon
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/wp2013-43.pdf

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:bca:bocawp:13-43

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada 234 Wellington Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0G9, Canada. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().