Many economists expect inflation to rise in 1995. These expectations are based on various approaches to forecasting inflation. One approach is based on the standard economic theory that inflation rises when slack is eliminated from the economy and production exceeds capacity constraints. According to this view, measures of economic slack such as unemployment and capacity utilization provide use...

This paper examines matched point and density forecasts of inflation from the Survey of Professional Forecasters to analyze the relationship between expected inflation, disagreement, and uncertainty. We extend previous studies through our data construction and estimation methodology. Specifically, we derive measures of disagreement and uncertainty by using a decomposition proposed in earlier re...

O ne of the more important challenges facing policymakers is that of assessing inflation expectations. Goodfriend (1997) points out that one can interpret the meaning of a given interest rate policy action primarily in terms of its impact on the real rate of interest. However, evaluating this impact requires not only that one understands the various links between the nominal rate and expected i...

Monetary policy-makers face a difficult task when evaluating the current state of the economy and deciding what actions are needed to achieve their objectives, such as keeping inflation within a given range. Because long and variable lags exist between a monetary policy action and its effects on economic variables, policy-makers need a way to assess whether their actions are having, or indeed w...

This paper assesses the effect of expected inflation and inflation risk on interest rates within the Fisher hypothesis framework. Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedastic models are used to estimate the conditional variability of inflation as a proxy for risk. With the UK quarterly data from 1958:4 to 1994:4, we found that both the expected inflation and the conditional variability of inflati...

Rational expectations are at the heart of the DSGE models maintained by central banks. A key equation which governs the evolution of prices in those models is the New Keynesian Phillips (NKPC) curve, in which today‟s rate of inflation is linked to expected future inflation. Expected future inflation is in turn modeled using rational expectations, which operationally means that forecast errors a...

This work proposes an alternative method for measuring monetary policy’s structural credibility under inflation targeting regimes by the main determinants of the expected inflation, and using a Kalman approach. It shows that such a method does not present some restrictions found in the existing credibility indexes, such as in Cecchetti and Krause (2002). It applies the new model and approach on...

The real rate of interest indicates borrowing costs (or the return on an investment in financial assets), disregarding price increases. The expected real interest rate is important to investments, consumption and savings, and is therefore significant in the evaluation of economic prospects. The problem is that since the inflation expectations of investors and borrowers are not known, it cannot ...