The Federal Reserve cut interest rates by 50 basis points on March 3, 2020, in response to concerns about the coronavirus (COVID-19). On March 5 and 6, I conducted an online survey of over 500 U.S. consumers that asked about their attention to, concerns about, and responses to the coronavirus,...

This paper uses an online survey experiment to study how President Trump's criticism of the Federal Reserve may affect consumers' long-run inflation expectations, confidence in the Fed, and responsiveness to information about inflation. A random subset of respondents view one of President...

We construct measures of individual forecasters' subjective uncertainty at horizons ranging from one to five years, incorporating a rich information set from the European Central Bank's Survey of Professional Forecasters. We find that the uncertainty curve is more linear than the disagreement...

The Board of Governors staff and the Federal Open Market Committee both publish macroeconomic forecasts. Romer and Romer (2008) show that policymakers' attempts to add information to the staff forecasts are counterproductive. In more recent years, however, policymakers have improved upon staff...

Consumer inflation expectations are highly disperse, with some households reporting very high inflation forecasts. In recent years, disagreement in longer-run inflation expectations has fallen, reflecting compression in the upper part of the distribution. The 75th percentile of the distribution...

Panel conditioning occurs when participation in previous survey rounds affects how respondents answer questions in later rounds. I document panel conditioning effects in reported inflation expectations and other responses in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Survey of Consumer Expectations....

About half of professional forecasters report that they use the natural rate of unemployment (u*) to forecast. I show that forecasters' reported use of and estimates of u* are informative about their expectations-formation process, including their use of a Phillips curve. Those who report not...

I construct a quarterly dataset on political pressure faced by 118 central banks from 2010 to 2018 using country-level reports. I code whether each central bank is reportedly succumbing to pressure, resisting pressure, or not facing pressure. About 10% of central banks reportedly face political...

Although uncertainty plays an important role in economic decisionmaking, empirical measures of individuals' uncertainty are rare. The literature on cognition and communication documents that people use round numbers to convey uncertainty. This paper introduces a method of quantifying the...

Variations in consumers' responsiveness to interest rates across households and over time may have important implications for monetary transmission. Survey questions from the Michigan Survey of Consumers provide an indication of the degree to which interest rates are a prominent consideration in...