Information Frictions Across Various Types of Inflation Expectations

Understanding how the degree of information frictions varies among economic agents is of utmost importance for macroeconomic dynamics. We document and compare the frequency of forecast revisions and cross-sectional disagreement in inflation expectations among five categories of agents: households, firms, professional forecasters, policymakers and participants to laboratory experiments. First, we provide evidence of a heterogeneous frequency of forecast revisions across categories of agents, with policymakers revising more frequently their forecasts than firms and professional forecasters. Households revise less frequently. Second, all categories exhibit cross-sectional disagreement. There is however a strong heterogeneity: while policymakers and professional forecasters exhibit low disagreement, firms and households show strong disagreement. Our analysis suggests that the nature of information frictions is closer to noisy information model features. We also explore the external validity of experimental expectations.