Michael F. Bryan

Testing Near-Rationality using Detailed Survey Data

This paper considers the evidence of “near-rationality,” as described by Akerlof, Dickens, and Perry (2000). Using detailed surveys of household inflation expectations for the United States and Sweden, we find that the data are generally unsupportive of the near-rationality hypothesis. However, we document that household inflation expectations tend to settle around discrete and largely fixed “focal points,” suggesting that both U.S. and Swedish households gauge inflation prospects in rather broad, qualitative terms. Moreover, the combination of a low-inflation environment and an inflation target in Sweden has been accompanied by a disproportionately high proportion of Swedish households expecting no inflation. However, a similar low-inflation trend in the United States, which does not have an explicit inflation target, reveals no such rise in the proportion of households expecting no inflation. This observation suggests that the way the central bank communicates its inflation objective may influence inflation expectations independently of the inflation trend it actually pursues.

A different kind of money illusion: The case of long and variable lags

An analysis of how the money supply process can affect the cross-covariance structure of inflation and monetary growth, showing that the Federal Reserves change in emphasis to monetary targeting in late 1979 could have made the apparently long lag from money growth to inflation virtually disappear in the 1980s.

A Note on the Efficient Estimation of Inflation in Brazil

This paper investigates the use of trimmed-mean estimators and time-series averaging as techniques for improving the signal-to-noise ratio in high-frequency price data. We show that trimmed-mean estimators substantially increase the efficiency of the aggregate estimator compared to the more standard mean-measures. In this way, these estimators also reduce a central banks need to time-series average the monthly inflation estimates which greatly improves the timeliness of the inflation statistic. In the case of Brazil, we find that asymmetrically trimming 24 percent from the tails of the price-change distribution reduces the RMSE of the monthly inflation statistic as a measure of the inflation trend by 23 percent, making it as accurate as the 3-month average growth rate of the mean retail price measure. We also demonstrate that a 3-month lagged moving average of the optimal (asymmetrically) trimmed mean is as efficient an estimator of the 24-month centered moving-average retail price growth trend as the mean inflation rate averaged over any horizon.

The Inflation Expectations of Firms: What Do They Look Like, are They Accurate, and Do They Matter?

The purpose of this paper is to answer the three questions in the title. Using a large monthly survey of businesses, we investigate the inflation expectations and uncertainties of firms. We document that, in the aggregate, firm inflation expectations are very similar to the predictions of professional forecasters for national inflation statistics, despite a somewhat greater heterogeneity of expectations that we attribute to the idiosyncratic cost structure firms face. We also show that firm inflation expectations bear little in common with the “prices in general” expectations reported by households. Next we show that, during our three-year sample, firm inflation expectations appear to be unbiased predictors of their year-ahead observed (perceived) inflation. We also show that firms know what they don’t know—that the accuracy of firm inflation expectations is significantly and negatively related to their uncertainty about future inflation. And lastly, we demonstrate, by way of a cross-sectional Phillips curve, that firm inflation expectations are a useful addition to a policymaker’s information set. We show that firms’ inflation perceptions depend (importantly) on their expectations for inflation and their perception of firm-level slack.