Assessing Expectations as a Monetary/Fiscal State-Dependent Phenomenon

Martin Geiger and Marios Zachariadis

University of Cyprus Working Papers in Economics from University of Cyprus Department of Economics

Abstract: We assess the impact of monetary and fiscal policy shocks on US survey-based macroeconomic expectations elicited from consumers and financial experts, within and outside low-debt states of the world. While we fail to detect a clear response to shocks in a linear model, our analysis reveals a number of state-dependent patterns. The response of consumers' expectations to the monetary and fiscal shocks we jointly consider is typically strong and distinctly different outside states of low debt as compared to within states of low debt where we observe little action. Outside low-debt states, an increase in government spending has adverse effects on expectations consistent with the anticipation of negative effects from a future fiscal consolidation. Moreover, contractionary monetary policy shocks induce pessimistic macroeconomic expectations outside the low-debt state but not within it, suggesting that the fiscal burden matters in how monetary policy affects expectations. Our findings are in line with rationally inattentive consumers not paying attention to shocks occurring when the fiscal burden is low. Finally, consumer expectations' responses more closely resemble those of experts outside the low-debt state, in line with consumers becoming more attentive to fiscal and monetary developments when the stakes are high.

Keywords: policy shocks; public debt; rational inattention; fiscal theory of the price level (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E31 E52 E62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2019-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.econ.ucy.ac.cy/RePEc/papers/01-19.pdf (application/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:ucy:cypeua:01-2019

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of Cyprus Working Papers in Economics from University of Cyprus Department of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().