Public's Inflation Expectations and Monetary Policy

The paper develops a DSGE model where monetary policy propagates by affecting and coordinating price setters' expectations. Price setters face costs of price adjustment and do not observe the history of technology, monetary, and preference shocks. They form expectations about the evolution of their nominal marginal costs observing their idiosyncratic productivity, which is correlated with the aggregate productivity, last period's output and inflation, and the interest rate set by the central bank according to a Taylor rule. The model is estimated through likelihood methods on a U.S. data set including the Survey of Professional Forecasters as a measure of price setters' expectations. The transmission channel based on price-setters' expectations is found to account for the following three empirical facts that have been documented by the VAR literature: (i) the delayed and persistent effects of monetary shocks on inflation with associated sluggish response of real output; (ii) the price puzzle; (iii) the disappearance of the price puzzle after the 1970s. Structural policies of disinflation, such as the introduction of an "inflation targeting", need to be backed up by a perfect commitment device to succeed.