Do inflation expectations respond to monetary policy? An empirical analysis for the United Kingdom

This paper studies how monetary policy impacts inflation expectations in the United Kingdom. Using higher moments of the distribution of inflation expectations, I construct a summary measure of expectations for households, firms, professional forecasters and financial markets. In a Bayesian VAR identified using a high frequency-identified monetary policy shock series, I find that a monetary policy tightening causes significant variation in the response of inflation expectations across groups: firms’ and financial market median expectations fall, while households’ inflation expectations rise. I document that monetary policy decisions act as a stabilisation mechanism by reducing the dispersion of expectations 12–18 months following a shock.