Are Household Inflation Expectations Anchored in Japan?

Koichiro Kamada, Jouchi Nakajima and Shusaku Nishiguchi
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Shusaku Nishiguchi: Bank of Japan

No 15-E-8, Bank of Japan Working Paper Series from Bank of Japan

Abstract: This paper investigates household inflation expectations and discusses the central bank's ability to anchor them. We use micro-data from a household survey on inflation expectations and fit a normal inverse Gaussian distribution to the data to remove the distortions included in them. The underlying distribution thus obtained is examined to characterize household inflation expectations, particularly from the term-structure point of view. The analysis indicates that long-term expectations are immune to actual price developments, while short-term expectations are easily affected by actual inflation. The paper also investigates to what extent household inflation expectations have been influenced by the Bank of Japan's policy stance. The analysis shows that the price stability target and the quantitative and qualitative monetary easing, introduced by the Bank in 2013, contributed to strengthening the anchor of inflation expectations. Nonetheless, the anchor still needs to be improved so that household expectations are invulnerable to any disturbances in actual inflation rates.

Keywords: inflation expectations; term structure; expectations dispersion; inflation target; inflation anchor; quantitative and qualitative monetary easing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E31 E52 E58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-07-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac and nep-mon
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

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