Household Inflation and Aggregate Inflation

Household Inflation and Aggregate Inflation PDF Author: Jacob Orchard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This project postulates that an additional cost of increased inflation is an increase in the cross-sectional dispersion of household-level inflation rates. Using scanner data and the Consumer Expenditure Survey, I construct novel measures of household-level inflation and show that households experience inflation at very different rates. An increase in a household's personal inflation rate leads to a persistent increase in their price index. Households respond to a personal inflation shock by decreasing nominal consumption, which means that real consumption falls more than one-for-one; poor households are least able to smooth their consumption in response to household inflation shocks. I find that inflation dispersion (the variance of household inflation rates) increases with the level of absolute aggregate inflation. This relationship is robust across time, methodology, and data.

Household Inflation and Aggregate Inflation

Household Inflation and Aggregate Inflation PDF Author: Jacob Orchard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This project postulates that an additional cost of increased inflation is an increase in the cross-sectional dispersion of household-level inflation rates. Using scanner data and the Consumer Expenditure Survey, I construct novel measures of household-level inflation and show that households experience inflation at very different rates. An increase in a household's personal inflation rate leads to a persistent increase in their price index. Households respond to a personal inflation shock by decreasing nominal consumption, which means that real consumption falls more than one-for-one; poor households are least able to smooth their consumption in response to household inflation shocks. I find that inflation dispersion (the variance of household inflation rates) increases with the level of absolute aggregate inflation. This relationship is robust across time, methodology, and data.

Inflation Expectations

Inflation Expectations PDF Author: Peter J. N. Sinclair
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135179778
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
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.

Inflation at the Household Level

Inflation at the Household Level PDF Author: Greg Kaplan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Consumption (Economics)
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
We use scanner data to estimate inflation rates at the household level. Households' inflation rates are remarkably heterogeneous, with an interquartile range that varies between 6.2 and 9.0 percentage points on an annual basis. Most of the heterogeneity comes not from variation in broadly defined consumption bundles but from variation in prices paid for the same types of goods -- a source of variation that previous research has not measured. The entire distribution of household inflation rates shifts in parallel with aggregate inflation. Deviations from aggregate inflation exhibit only slightly negative serial correlation within each household over time, implying that the difference between a household's price level and the aggregate price level is persistent. Together, the large cross-sectional dispersion and low serial correlation of household-level inflation rates mean that almost all of the variability in a household's inflation rate over time comes from variability in household-level prices relative to average prices for the same goods, not from variability in the aggregate inflation rate. We provide a characterization of the stochastic process for household inflation that can be used to calibrate models of household decisions.

Toward a More Accurate Measure of the Cost of Living

Toward a More Accurate Measure of the Cost of Living PDF Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Advisory Commission to Study the Consumer Price Index
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Consumer price indexes
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description


Inflation Experience and Inflation Expectations

Inflation Experience and Inflation Expectations PDF Author: Benjamin K. Johannsen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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The Great Inflation

The Great Inflation PDF Author: Michael D. Bordo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226066959
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
Controlling inflation is among the most important objectives of economic policy. By maintaining price stability, policy makers are able to reduce uncertainty, improve price-monitoring mechanisms, and facilitate more efficient planning and allocation of resources, thereby raising productivity. This volume focuses on understanding the causes of the Great Inflation of the 1970s and ’80s, which saw rising inflation in many nations, and which propelled interest rates across the developing world into the double digits. In the decades since, the immediate cause of the period’s rise in inflation has been the subject of considerable debate. Among the areas of contention are the role of monetary policy in driving inflation and the implications this had both for policy design and for evaluating the performance of those who set the policy. Here, contributors map monetary policy from the 1960s to the present, shedding light on the ways in which the lessons of the Great Inflation were absorbed and applied to today’s global and increasingly complex economic environment.

Do Household Expectations Help Predict Inflation?

Do Household Expectations Help Predict Inflation? PDF Author: Mr. Luis Brandão-Marques
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 32

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Book Description
We examine whether changes in the distribution of household inflation expectations contain information on future inflation. We first discuss recent shifts in micro data from the US, UK, Germany, and Canada. We then zoom in on the US to explore econometrically whether distributional characteristics help predict future inflation. We find that the shape of the distribution of household expectations does indeed help predict one-year-ahead CPI inflation. Variance and skewness of household expectations’ distributions add predictive power beyond and above the median, especially in periods of high inflation. Remarkably, qualitatively, these results hold when including market-based measures and moments of the distribution of professional forecasts.

Greater Than the Sum of the Parts: Aggregate Vs. Aggregated Inflation Expectations

Greater Than the Sum of the Parts: Aggregate Vs. Aggregated Inflation Expectations PDF Author: Alexander M. Dietrich
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Household Inflation Expectations and Consumer Spending

Household Inflation Expectations and Consumer Spending PDF Author: Mary A. Burke
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Essays on Household Consumption and Relative Prices

Essays on Household Consumption and Relative Prices PDF Author: Jacob D. Orchard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Chapter one examines the cyclical behavior of low-income versus high-income household price indices and documents two new facts: (1) during recessions prices rise more for products purchased relatively more by low-income households (necessities); (2) the aggregate share of spending devoted to necessities is counter-cyclical. I present a mechanism where adverse macroeconomic shocks cause households to shift expenditure away from luxuries toward necessities, which leads to higher relative prices for necessities. I embed this mechanism into a quantitative model which explains over half of the cyclical variation in necessity prices and shares. The results suggest that low-income households are hit twice by recessions: once by the recession itself and again as their price index increases relative to other households. Chapter two presents evidence that the high estimated MPCs from the leading household studies result in implausible macroeconomic counterfactuals. Using the 2008 tax rebate as a case study, we calibrate a standard medium-scale New Keynesian model with the estimated micro MPCs to construct counterfactual macroeconomic consumption paths in the absence of a rebate. The counterfactual paths imply that consumption expenditures would have plummeted in spring and summer 2008 and then recovered when Lehman Brothers failed in September 2008. We use narratives and forecasts to argue that these paths are implausible. We go on to show that reasonable modifications of the model result in general equilibrium forces that dampen rather than amplify micro MPCs. We also show that estimators of the average treatment effect yield smaller micro MPC estimates than the standard two-way fixed effects estimators. The combination of smaller micro MPCs and dampening general equilibrium forces implies general equilibrium consumption multipliers that are below 0.2. In chapter three, I construct novel measures of household-level inflation and show that an increase in a household's personal inflation rate leads to a persistent increase in their price index. Households respond to a personal inflation shock by decreasing nominal consumption, which means their real consumption falls more than one-for-one. I also find a statisically robust relationship between inflation dispersion (the variance of household inflation rates) and the level of absolute aggregate inflation.