How does uncertainty about economic policy translate into uncertainty about macroeconomic outcomes, in particular inflation? New measures of consumer inflation uncertainty are compared to the economic and monetary policy uncertainty indices of Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2015). Economic policy...

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...

This paper uses an experiment embedded in a survey to analyze the response of consumers' long-run inflation expectations to information about the Federal Reserve's inflation target and a graph and summary of past inflation. On average, respondents revise forecasts toward the 2% target with...

Social science research studies are frequently conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). I use data from four previous economics studies conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk, with a total of 2780 observations, to study how participant characteristics and behaviors depend on the day of the week...

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...

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....

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...