Using Italian data from Twitter, we employ textual data and machine learning techniques to build new real-time measures of consumers' inflation expectations. First, we select some relevant keywords to identify tweets related to prices and expectations thereof. Second, we build a set of daily...

This paper investigates whether Italian households' actual expenditure and willingness to buy durables (cars) are related to their inflation expectations. In a high-inflation regime, as in the early 1990s, consumers with higher inflation expectations tend to have higher current than future...

In past years there have been suggestions for monetary policy to engineer higher inflation expectations to stimulate spending. We examine the relationship between the inflation expectations of firms and their investment plans using Italian business survey data over the period 2012-2016. We show...

When the economy is subject to recurrent structural shifts, the monetary authority cannot credibly commit to a systematic approach to policy, since consistency between promises and actions is not easily verifiable; moreover, since agents have incomplete knowledge of the surrounding environment,...

The applied literature on adaptive learning has mostly focused on small, linear models, with homogenous expectations. In non-linear models heterogeneous expectations prevail and the process through which agents select (and change) a forecasting model becomes a necessary ingredient of the...

The flattening of the Phillips curve observed in the industrial countries has been attributed to globalisation, while the traditional explanation centres on monetary policy credibility. The empirical literature is not conclusive, since macroeconomic data are affected by substantial...

The paper compares the main monetary policy strategies to assess which one is the best performing in terms of both minimising the volatility of inflation and the output-gap and reducing the probability of falling into a liquidity trap. The strategies differ in the degree of history dependence...

In New Keynesian models favourable cost-push shocks lower inflation and increase output. Yet, when the central bank's inflation target is not perfectly observed these shocks turn contractionary as agents erroneously perceive a temporary reduction in the target. This effect is amplified when...

We analyse the degree of anchoring of inflation expectations in the euro area. Using a new estimation technique, we look at the tail co-movement between the moments of short- and long-term distributions of inflation expectations, where those distributions are estimated from daily quotes of...

We study euro-area risk-adjusted expected inflation and the inflation risk premium at different maturities, leveraging inflation swaps, inflation options and survey-based forecasts. We introduce a model that features time-varying long-term average inflation and time-varying inflation volatility...