Are Households Indifferent to Monetary Policy Announcements?

Fiorella De Fiore, Marco Lombardi and Johannes Schuffels

No 17041, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We study the impact of the Fed’s monetary policy announcements on households’ expectations by comparing responses to the Survey of Consumer Expectations before and after Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings, over the period 2013-2019. We find that Fed decisions affect expectations of interest rates on savings accounts, particularly for respondents with high financial and numerical literacy. The effect is particularly strong in the first few days after the announcement of the decision and decays in the days that follow. The impact of monetary policy announcements on inflation expectations is muted, even in response to some of the most relevant meetings of the FOMC that took place during that period. Expectations of personal financial conditions are barely affected. Our results stand in contrast to experimental studies that find strong effects of monetary policy and other macroeconomic news on expectations of households receiving a specific treatment, suggesting that the news naturally reaching the general population may provide weaker signals.

Keywords: Household expectations; Monetary policy announcements; Communication (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E30 E40 E50 E70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-02
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP17041 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Are households indifferent to monetary policy announcements? (2021)
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:cpr:ceprdp:17041

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP17041

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().