High and Uncertain Inflation: Results from a New Data Set

The authors use a data set of inflation expectations that covers twenty years and forty-four countries to investigate the relationship between the level and uncertainty of inflation. While there is strong and robust evidence of a relationship between average inflation and average uncertainty across countries, there is little evidence in their data for a within country relationship. In particular, very few of the countries in the sample exhibit a relationship between lagged inflation and future uncertainty. This result holds even when the authors use a bootstrapping technique that is robust to small sample size and heteroscedasticity.