Public expectations and perceptions of inflation may affect economic decisions, and have subsequent effects on actual inflation. The Michigan Survey of Consumers uses questions about 'prices in general' to measure expected and perceived inflation. Median responses track official measure of...

We compare the inflation expectations reported by consumers in a survey with their behavior in a financially incentivized investment experiment designed such that future inflation affects payoffs. The inflation expectations survey is found to be informative in the sense that the beliefs reported...

We examine businesses' price-setting practices via open-ended interviews and in a quantitative survey module with business contacts from the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta, Cleveland, and New York in December 2022 and January 2023. Businesses indicated that their prices were strongly...

We study the behavior of U.S. consumers' inflation expectations during the high inflation period of 2021-22 using data from the Survey of Consumer Expectations. Short- and, to a lesser extent, mediumterm inflation expectations rose as inflation surged in 2021. Disagreement and uncertainty about...

Understanding the formation of consumer inflation expectations is considered crucial for managing monetary policy. This paper investigates how consumers form and update their inflation expectations using a unique information experiment embedded in a survey. We first elicit respondents'...

This report presents an overview of the Survey of Consumer Expectations, a new monthly online survey of a rotating panel of household heads. The survey collects timely information on consumers' expectations and decisions on a broad variety of topics, including but not limited to inflation,...

We propose a new approach to assessing the anchoring of inflation expectations using "strategic surveys". Namely, we measure households' revisions in long-run inflation expectations after they are presented with different economic scenarios. A key advantage of this approach is that it provides a...

This paper studies how inflation beliefs reported in the New York Fed's Survey of Consumer Expectations have evolved since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that household inflation expectations responded slowly and mostly at the short-term horizon. In contrast, the data reveal...

This paper reports preliminary findings from a Federal Reserve Bank of New York research program aimed at improving survey measures of inflation expectations. We find that seemingly small differences in how inflation is referred to in a survey can lead respondents to consider significantly...

National surveys follow consumers' expectations of future inflation, because they may directly affect the economic choices they make, indirectly affect macroeconomic outcomes, and be considered in monetary policy. Yet relatively little is known about how individuals form the inflation...