IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/
MyIDEAS: Login to save this paper or follow this series

Do People Understand Monetary Policy?

Author Info

  • Fernanda Nechio

    (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco)

  • Carlos Carvalho

    (Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio))

Abstract

We combine questions from the Michigan Survey about the future path of prices, interest rates, and unemployment to investigate whether U.S. households are aware of the so-called Taylor (1993) rule. For comparison, we perform the same analysis using questions from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. Our findings support the view that some households form their expectations about the future path of interest rates, inflation, and unemployment in a way that is consistent with Taylor-type rules. The extent to which this happens, however, does not appear to be uniform across income and education levels. In particular, we find evidence that the relationship between unemployment and interest rates is not properly understood by households in the lowest income quartile, and by those with no high school diploma. We also find evidence that the perceived effect of unemployment on interest rates is asymmetric, being only relevant for interest-rate decreases. Finally, we argue that the relationships that we uncover can be given a causal interpretation.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.

File URL: https://www.economicdynamics.org/meetpapers/2012/paper_426.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Paper provided by Society for Economic Dynamics in its series 2012 Meeting Papers with number 426.

as
in new window

Length:
Date of creation: 2012
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:red:sed012:426
Contact details of provider: Postal: Society for Economic Dynamics Christian Zimmermann Economic Research Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis PO Box 442 St. Louis MO 63166-0442 USA
Fax: 1-314-444-8731
Web page: http://www.EconomicDynamics.org/society.htmEmail:


More information through EDIRC

Keywords:

Other versions of this item:

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:

as in new window
  1. John B. Taylor, 2007. "Housing and monetary policy," Proceedings - Economic Policy Symposium - Jackson Hole, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, pages 463-476.
  2. James D. Hamilton & Seth Pruitt & Scott C. Borger, 2009. "The market-perceived monetary policy rule," International Finance Discussion Papers 982, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
  3. Eric M. Leeper & Christopher A. Sims & Tao Zha, 1996. "What Does Monetary Policy Do?," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 27(2), pages 1-78.
  4. Taylor, John B., 1993. "Discretion versus policy rules in practice," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 195-214, December.
  5. Jordi Galí & Frank Smets & Rafael Wouters, 2011. "Unemployment in an Estimated New Keynesian Model," Working Papers 541, Barcelona Graduate School of Economics.
  6. Schmidt, Sandra & Nautz, Dieter, 2010. "Why do financial market experts misperceive future monetary policy decisions?," ZEW Discussion Papers 10-045, ZEW - Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung / Center for European Economic Research.
  7. Stefano Eusepi & Bruce Preston, 2007. "Central Bank Communication and Expectations Stabilization," NBER Working Papers 13259, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  8. Andrade, Philippe & Le Bihan, Hervé, 2013. "Inattentive professional forecasters," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(8), pages 967-982.
  9. Mankiw, N. Gregory & Reis, Ricardo & Wolfers, Justin, 2003. "Disagreement about Inflation Expectations," Research Papers 1807, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
  10. Tabea Bucher-Koenen & Annamaria Lusardi, 2011. "Financial Literacy and Retirement Planning in Germany," CeRP Working Papers 109, Center for Research on Pensions and Welfare Policies, Turin (Italy).
  11. Carlos Madeira & Basit Zafar, 2012. "Heterogeneus Inflation Expectations Learning and Market Outcomes," Working Papers Central Bank of Chile 667, Central Bank of Chile.
  12. Eric R. Sims, 2012. "Inflation Expectations and Readiness to Spend, Cross-Sectional Evidence," Working Papers 015, University of Notre Dame, Department of Economics, revised Mar 2012.
  13. James D. Hamilton & Seth Pruitt & Scott Borger, 2011. "Estimating the Market-Perceived Monetary Policy Rule," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 3(3), pages 1-28, July.
  14. Charles F. Manski & Elie Tamer, 2002. "Inference on Regressions with Interval Data on a Regressor or Outcome," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 70(2), pages 519-546, March.
  15. Michael Woodford, 2013. "Macroeconomic Analysis Without the Rational Expectations Hypothesis," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 5(1), pages 303-346, 05.
  16. Maarten van Rooij & Annamaria Lusardi & Rob Alessie, 2011. "Financial Literacy, Retirement Planning, and Household Wealth," CeRP Working Papers 119, Center for Research on Pensions and Welfare Policies, Turin (Italy).
  17. Giorgio E. Primiceri, 2005. "Time Varying Structural Vector Autoregressions and Monetary Policy," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 72(3), pages 821-852.
  18. Wilbert van der Klaauw & Wandi Bruine de Bruin & Giorgio Topa & Basit Zafar & Olivier Armantier, 2012. "Inflation Expectations and Behavior: Do Survey Respondents Act on their Beliefs?," 2012 Meeting Papers 121, Society for Economic Dynamics.
  19. Lusardi, Annamaria & Mitchell, Olivia S., 2011. "Financial literacy and retirement planning in the United States," Journal of Pension Economics and Finance, Cambridge University Press, vol. 10(04), pages 509-525, October.
  20. Olivier Coibion & Yuriy Gorodnichenko, 2010. "Information Rigidity and the Expectations Formation Process: A Simple Framework and New Facts," Working Papers 102, Department of Economics, College of William and Mary.
  21. Daniel Tortorice, 2010. "Unemployment Expectations and the Business Cycle," Working Papers 05, Brandeis University, Department of Economics and International Businesss School, revised Mar 2011.
  22. van Rooij, Maarten C.J. & Lusardi, Annamaria & Alessie, Rob J.M., 2011. "Financial literacy and retirement planning in the Netherlands," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 32(4), pages 593-608, August.
  23. Fabia A. de Carvalho & André Minella, 2009. "Market Forecasts in Brazil: performance and determinants," Working Papers Series 185, Central Bank of Brazil, Research Department.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Blog mentions

As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
  1. Do people know what the Taylor Rule is?
    by Economic Logician in Economic Logic on 2012-03-30 14:01:00
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window


Cited by:

  1. Dräger, L. & Lamla, M.J. & Pfajfar, D., 2013. "Are Consumer Expectations Theory-Consistent? The Role of Macroeconomic Determinants and Central Bank Communication," Discussion Paper 2013-063, Tilburg University, Center for Economic Research.
  2. Rüdiger Bachmann & Tim O. Berg & Eric R. Sims, 2012. "Inflation Expectations and Readiness to Spend: Cross-Sectional Evidence," NBER Working Papers 17958, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  3. Michael Ehrmann, 2014. "Targeting Inflation from Below - How Do Inflation Expectations Behave?," Working Papers 14-52, Bank of Canada.
  4. Guimarães, Rodrigo, 2014. "Expectations, risk premia and information spanning in dynamic term structure model estimation," Bank of England working papers 489, Bank of England.
  5. repec:dgr:kubcen:2013063 is not listed on IDEAS
  6. Jinill Kim & Seth Pruitt, 2013. "Estimating Monetary Policy Rules When Nominal Interest Rates Are Stuck at Zero," CAMA Working Papers 2013-53, Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.
  7. Andrade, Philippe & Crump, Richard K. & Eusepi, Stefano & Moench, Emanuel, 2013. "Noisy information and fundamental disagreement," Staff Reports 655, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

This item is featured on the following reading lists or Wikipedia pages:

  1. Economic Logic blog

Access and download statistics

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:red:sed012:426. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Christian Zimmermann)

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

This information is provided to you by IDEAS at the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis using RePEc data.