Price discovery on traded inflation expectations: does the financial crisis matter?

We analyze contributions of different markets, related by an approximate arbitrage relationship, to price discovery on traded inflation expectations and how it changed during the financial crisis. We use a new high-frequency data-set on inflation-indexed and nominal government bonds as well as inflation swaps to calculate information shares of break-even inflation rates in the euro area and the USA. In the euro area, for maturities up to 5 years new information comes from both the swap and the bond markets. For longer maturities, the swap market provides less and less information in the euro area. In the USA, the bond market dominates the price discovery process for all maturities. The severe financial crisis that spread out in Autumn 2008 drove a wedge between bond and swap break-even inflation rates in both currencies. Price discovery ceased to take place on the swap market. Disruptions coming from the short-end of the market even separated price formation on both segments for maturities of up to 6 years in the USA. Against the backdrop of the most severe financial crisis in decades, contributions to price formation concentrated a lot more on the presumably safest financial instrument: government bonds.