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...

Central banks emphasize the use of communication as a tool of monetary policy. As central banks increasingly recognize that low public informedness limits their ability to communicate with the general public, several have begun to explicitly tailor their communication strategies for a broader...

Consumer inflation expectations are positively correlated with gas prices. The optimal monetary policy response to energy price fluctuations depends on whether inflation expectations are excessively sensitive to gas prices, perhaps due to their high volatility and salience. I use multi-horizon...

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...

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...

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...

Expected inflation is a central variable in economic theory. Economic historians have estimated historical inflation expectations for a variety of purposes, including studies of the Fisher effect, the debt deflation hypothesis, central bank credibility, and expectations formation. I survey the...

This letter uses consumer survey data to estimate expectations-augmented Phillips curves with inflation expectations disaggregated by socioeconomic and demographic groups. The inflation expectations of high-income, college-educated, male, and working-age people play a larger role in inflation...

This comment provides a correction to the paper "Is the Phillips Curve Alive and Well After All? Inflation Expectations and the Missing Disinflation" by Olivier Coibion and Yuriy Gorodnichenko (2015) in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics