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...

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...

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...

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'...

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...