News and Uncertainty about COVID-19: Survey Evidence and Short-Run Economic Impact

Keith Kuester, Gernot Müller and Raphael Schoenle

No 202012, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

Abstract: We survey households about their expectations of the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, in real time and at daily frequency. Our baseline question asks about the expected impact on output and inflation over a one-year horizon. Starting on March 10, the median response suggests that the expected output loss is still moderate. This changes over the course of three weeks: At the end of March, the expected loss amounts to some 15 percent. Meanwhile, the pandemic is expected to raise inflation considerably. The uncertainty about these effects is very large. In the second part of the paper we feed the survey data into a New Keynesian business cycle model. Because the economic costs of the pandemic have not fully materialized yet but are nonetheless (a) anticipated and (b) uncertain, private expenditure collapses, thereby amplifying and bringing forward in time the economic costs of the pandemic. The short-run economic impact of the pandemic depends critically on whether monetary policy accommodates the drop in the natural rate of interest or not.

Keywords: corona; zero lower bound; uncertainty; news shocks; COVID-19; monetary policy; household expectations; natural rate; survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C83 E43 E52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45
Date: 2020-04-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-dge, nep-mac, nep-mon and nep-ore
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DOI: 10.26509/frbc-wp-202012

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