Inflation expectation uncertainty, inflation and the output gap

Uncertainty about the future path of inflation affects consumption, saving and investment decisions as well as wage negotiations and price setting of firms. These decisions are based on inflation expectations which are a key determinant of inflation in the New Keynesian Phillips Curve. In this paper we therefore explicitly analyse the relationship between inflation expectations, the inflation rate and the output gap and the variance of these variables as uncertainty measures by using a VAR-GARCH-inmean model. Our main finding is that inflation expectation uncertainty is positively related to expected inflation and to the inflation rate.