The effectiveness of monetary policy and the political legitimacy of the Federal Reserve depend on monetary policymakers' ability to communicate with the public, which in turn depends in part on the news media. While the finance and economics literature has investigated select aspects of...

Using daily consumer survey data, we analyze the transmission of gas prices to consumer beliefs and expectations about the economy. We exploit the high frequency and geographic disaggregation of our dataset to facilitate identification. Consumer sentiment becomes more pessimistic with rising gas...

This policy brief discusses trends in consumer inflation uncertainty. Inflation uncertainty measures are from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Survey of Consumer Expectations and from the Michigan Survey of Consumers

We conduct a survey of 2,500 Chinese households to study their formation of gas price expectations following the 2022 Ukraine war. Respondents provided their priors about recent and future gas price inflation. Participants were randomly exposed to information about recent gas price inflation,...

Next to the Supreme Court, the Federal Reserve is one of the most powerful and influential institutions in American social and political life, wielding unelected power. And much like the Court, the Fed’s legitimacy is foundational to its authority. Yet the conditions of the Fed’s legitimacy...

Since its founding in 1913, the central bank of the United States has enjoyed a reputation as an erudite institution. Rigorous, well-resourced, and expansive research has become a hallmark of the Federal Reserve System. Indeed, research is itself a core function of the Fed: it both underpins Fed...

In recent years, warnings of a populist threat to central bank independence have proliferated. These warnings are based on a deep-seated antagonism between technocracy and populism.I argue that to understand current challenges for central banks, we should question the assumed antagonism between...

When surveys rely on repeat participants, this raises the possibility that survey participation may affect future responses, perhaps by prompting information acquisition between survey waves. We show that these "learning-through-survey" effects are large for household inflation expectations....

Households were surveyed in the days immediately before and after the June release of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The CPI release was associated with an 11 percentage point increase in the likelihood that a respondent heard news about inflation, with a larger increase for highly-numerate...