Decomposing the declining volatility of long-term inflation expectations

The level and volatility of survey-based measures of long-term inflation expectations have come down dramatically over the past several decades. To capture these changes in inflation dynamics, we embed both short- and long-term expectations into a medium-scale VAR model with stochastic volatility. The model estimates attribute most of the marked decline in the volatility of expectations to smaller shocks to long-run inflation expectations. According to our estimates, the volatility of shocks plummeted in the early to mid-1980s, moved to a somewhat higher level that prevailed for much of the 1990s, and then declined to and remained at very low levels.