The rational expectations hypothesis for survey and model-based inflation forecasts - from the Survey of Professional Forecasters and the Greenbook respectively - is examined by properly taking into account persistence in the data. The finding of nearunit-root effects in inflation and inflation expectations motivates the use of a local-tounity specification of the inflation process that enables us to test whether the data are generated by locally non-stationary or stationary processes. Thus, we test, rather than assume, stationarity of near-unit-root processes. In addition, we set out an empirical framework for assessing relationships between locally non-stationary series. In this context, we test the rational expectations hypothesis by allowing the co-existence of a long-run relationship obtained under the rational expectations restrictions with short-run "learning" effects. Our empirical results indicate that the rational expectations hypothesis holds in the long run, while forecasters adjust their expectations slowly in the short run. This finding lends support to the hypothesis that the persistence of inflation comes from the dynamics of expectations.

Understanding the sources of inflation persistence is crucial for monetary policy. This paper provides an empirical assessment of the influence of inflation expectations' anchoring on the persistence of inflation. We construct a novel index of inflation expectations' anchoring using survey-based inflation forecasts for 45 economies starting in 1989. We then study the response of consumer prices to terms-of-trade shocks for countries with flexible exchange rates. We find that these shocks have a significant and persistent effect on consumer price inflation when expectations are poorly anchored. By contrast, inflation reacts by less and returns quickly to its pre-shock level when expectations are strongly anchored.

Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.

Recent successive over-predictions of inflation have renewed interest in the rationality of forecasters and what causes their forecasts to deviate from rational expectations This paper examines inflation forecast data from the Livingston Survey and the ASA/NBER Survey of Professional Forecasters over the past 30 years to determine what publicly available macroeconomic information, if any, explains the persistence of forecast errors. A reduced form VAR is used to identify potential inefficiencies and then calculate the impulse response functions and variance decompositions of forecasts errors to analyze how shocks to the other endogenous variables of the VAR affect forecast error behavior. The study finds that the majority of public information is used by forecasters efficiently and therefore, supports weak form rational expectations of inflation, however, there appears to be significant inefficiency in the use of past forecast errors and the term structure of interest rates in the forecasts of both surveys. The IRF analysis also uncovers a significant change in the structure and variance of forecast errors that occurs in the early 1980's. It is hypothesized that this structural change of inflation forecast errors is related to a change in the way the Federal Reserve has conducted monetary policy since the end of the Volcker deflation in 1983.

Understanding the sources of inflation persistence is crucial for monetary policy. This paper provides an assessment of the influence of inflation expectations' anchoring on the persistence of inflation. We construct an index of inflation expectations' anchoring using survey-based inflation forecasts for 45 economies since 1989. We then study the response of consumer prices to terms-of-trade shocks and find that these shocks have a significant and persistent effect on consumer price inflation when expectations are poorly anchored. By contrast, inflation reacts by less and returns quickly to its pre-shock level when expectations are strongly anchored.

The consensus among central bankers is that higher inflation expectations can drive up inflation today, requiring tighter policy. We assess this by devising a novel method for identifying shocks to inflation expectations, estimating a semi-structural VAR where an expectation shock is identified as that which causes measured expectations to diverge from rationality. Using data for the United States, we find that a positive inflation expectations shock is deflationary and contractionary: inflation, output, and interest rates all fall. These results are inconsistent with the standard New Keynesian model, which predicts inflation and interest rate hikes. We discuss possible resolutions to this new puzzle.

This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved, including the spread of inflation targeting and the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so.