Economists and policy makers increasingly consult national household surveys asking individuals about their economic circumstances, financial decisions, and expectations for the future. For decades, the Reuters/Michigan Survey of Consumers and other national surveys have asked about expectations...

National surveys follow consumers’ expectations of future inflation, because these may directly affect the economic choices they make, indirectly affect macro-economic outcomes, and are considered in monetary policy. Yet, relatively little is known about how individuals form the inflation...

Understanding the formation of consumer inflation expectations is considered crucial for managing monetary policy. This paper investigates how consumers form and update their inflation expectations using a unique information experiment embedded in a survey. We first elicit respondents'...

This paper reports preliminary findings from a Federal Reserve Bank of New York research program aimed at improving survey measures of inflation expectations. We find that seemingly small differences in how inflation is referred to in a survey can lead respondents to consider significantly...

National surveys follow consumers' expectations of future inflation, because they may directly affect the economic choices they make, indirectly affect macroeconomic outcomes, and be considered in monetary policy. Yet relatively little is known about how individuals form the inflation...

Public expectations and perceptions of inflation may affect economic decisions, and have subsequent effects on actual inflation. The Michigan Survey of Consumers uses questions about 'prices in general' to measure expected and perceived inflation. Median responses track official measure of...

Survey measures of consumer inflation expectations have an important shortcoming in that, while providing useful summary measures of the distribution of point forecasts across individuals, they contain no direct information about an individual's uncertainty about future inflation. The latter is...

We compare the inflation expectations reported by consumers in a survey with their behavior in a financially incentivized investment experiment designed such that future inflation affects payoffs. The inflation expectations survey is found to be informative in the sense that the beliefs reported...

This report presents an overview of the Survey of Consumer Expectations, a new monthly online survey of a rotating panel of household heads. The survey collects timely information on consumers' expectations and decisions on a broad variety of topics, including but not limited to inflation,...

This paper studies how inflation beliefs reported in the New York Fed's Survey of Consumer Expectations have evolved since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that household inflation expectations responded slowly and mostly at the short-term horizon. In contrast, the data reveal...