the fisher hypothesis and the forecastability and persistence of inflation abstract for the period 1860 to 1939 the simple correlation of the u s commercial paper rate with the contemporaneous inflation rate is 0 17 the corresponding correlation for the period 1950 to 1979 is 0 71 this paper attributes this apparent change in the fisher relation to differences in the stochastic process of inflation rather than a change in any structural relationship between interest rates and expected inflation contrary to recent claims in the literature there is little evidence of inflation non neutrality in data from the pre world war i period

nowcasting and the taylor rule actual federal funds rates in the u s have at times deviated from the recommendations of a simple taylor rule this paper proposes a nowcasting taylor rule that preserves the form of the taylor rule but encompasses realistic assumptions on information observable to policymakers because contemporaneous inflation rates and output gaps are not observable at the time policy is set policymakers must form nowcasts the optimal nowcast will depend in part on forecast uncertainty whenever policymakers have asymmetric costs to over and underpredicting inflation and output empirical evidence shows that actual policy rates are consistent with those recommended by a nowcasting taylor rule

rational heuristics expectations and behaviors in evolving economies with heterogeneous interacting agents we analyze the individual and macroeconomic impacts of heterogeneous expectations and action rules within an agent based model populated by heterogeneous interacting firms agents have to cope with a complex evolving economy characterized by deep uncertainty resulting from technical change imperfect information coordination hurdles and structural breaks in these circumstances we find that neither individual nor macroeconomic dynamics improve when agents replace myopic expectations with less naive learning rules our results suggest that fast and frugal robust heuristics may not be a second best option but rather rational responses in complex and changing macroeconomic environments jel c63 d8 e32 e6 o4

the inexorable and mysterious tradeoff between inflation and unemployment this paper discusses the short run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment although this tradeoff remains a necessary building block of business cycle theory economists have yet to provide a completely satisfactory explanation for it according to the consensus view among central bankers and monetary economists a contractionary monetary shock raises unemployment at least temporarily and leads to a delayed and gradual fall in inflation standard dynamic models of price adjustment however cannot explain this pattern of responses reconciling the consensus view about the effects of monetary policy with models of price adjustment remains an outstanding puzzle for business cycle theorists several years ago i gave myself a peculiar assignment i decided to try to summarise all of economics in ten simply stated principles the purpose of this task was to introduce students to the economic way of thinking in the first chapter of my textbook principles of economics i figured if god could boil all of moral philosophy down to ten commandments i should be able to do much the same with economic science most of the ten principles i chose were microeconomic and hard to argue with they involved the importance of tradeoffs marginal analysis the benefits of trade market efficiency market failure and so on i allocated the last three principles to macroeconomics the first of these was a country s standard of living depends on its ability to produce goods and services which i viewed as the foundation of all growth theory the second was prices rise when the government prints too much money which i took to be the essence of classical monetary theory the last of my ten principles is the subject of today s lecture society faces a short run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment perhaps not surprisingly this statement turned out to be controversial when my publisher sent out the manuscript for review a few readers objected

disinflation with imperfect credibility abstract this paper presents a theory of the real effects of disinflation as in new keynesian models price adjustment iis staggered across firms as in new classical models credibility is imperfect the monetary authority may not complete a promised disinflation the combination of imperfect credibility and staggering yields more plausible results than either of these assumptions alone in particular an announced disinflation reduces expected output if credibility is sufficiently low

inflation announcements and social dynamics this paper investigates the eectiveness of central bank communication when rms have heterogeneous ination expectations that are updated through social dynamics the bank s credibility evolves with these dynamics and determines how well its announcements anchor expectations we show that trying to eliminate high ination by abruptly introducing a low ination target can lead to short term overshooting

information rigidities inflation perceptions and the media lessons from the euro cash changeover the objective of theoretical models of information rigidities is to capture the fact that people are constrained in their ability to acquire and process all available information given that most people obtain their information about the economy from the media press coverage of the economy may exert an influence on peoples attitudes this paper tests for this influence by examining consumers inflation perceptions in the aftermath of the euro cash changeover which serves as a natural experiment using a new data set that quantifies the intensity and tone of media reports we document that media reporting has had a statistically significant and economically meaningful impact on inflation perceptions and contributed to their sharp rise in the aftermath of the euro cash changeover and to the divergence between inflation perceptions and actual inflation rates jel e53 d83

volume flexibility in services the costs and benefits of flexible labor resources organizations can create volume flexibility the ability to increase capacity up or down to meet demand for a single service through the use of flexible labor resources e g part time and temporary workers as compared to full time workers although organizations are increasingly using these resources the relationship between flexible labor resources and financial performance has not been examined empirically in the service setting we use two years of archival data from 445 stores of a large retailer to study this relationship we hypothesize and find that increasing the labor mix of temporary or part time workers shows an inverted u shaped relationship with sales and profit while temporary labor mix has a u shaped relationship with expenses thus although flexible labor resources can create volume flexibility for a firm along multiple dimensions it is possible to have too much of a good thing this paper was accepted by serguei netessine operations management

why do manufacturers issue coupons an empirical analysis of breakfast cereals we explore the relationship between shelf prices and manufacturers coupons for 25 readyto eat breakfast cereals we find that shelf prices are lower during periods when coupons are available this result is inconsistent with static monopoly price discrimination under a broad range of assumptions we present evidence that is inconsistent with both dynamic theories of price discrimination and explanations of couponing based on the vertical relationship between manufacturers and retailers we find support for models of price discrimination in oligopoly settings as well as suggestions that firmwide incentives may induce managers to use coupons and price cuts simultaneously finally lagged coupons have a positive effect on current sales suggesting that coupons are used to induce repurchase

expectations as a source of macroeconomic persistence evidence from survey expectations in a dynamic macro model abstract embedding survey expectations in a standard dsge model helps to identify key slope parameters in standard relationships dramatically reduces the need for lagged dependent variables often motivated by price indexation and habit formation and obviates the need for autocorrelated structural shocks in the key equations formal statistical tests demonstrate that much of the persistence in aggregate data is better accounted for by slow moving expectations rather than by habits indexation and autocorrelated structural shocks

sticky information phillips curves european evidence we estimate the sticky information phillips curve model of mankiw and reis 2002 using survey expectations of professional forecasters from four major european economies our estimates imply that in ation expectations in france germany and the united kingdom are updated about once a year in italy about once each six months

survey measures of expected u s inflation of real interest rates and cash flows for decisions concerning investment expenditures international capital flows and exchange rate movements hinge in large part on expected real yield differentials across countries the federal reserve needs reliable measures of expected inflation to formulate and gauge the thrust of monetary policy in fact inflation expectations have become more important to the fed given the diminished stability of the link between the monetary aggregates and gdp expenditures since the early 1980s and the greater role which has been thrust upon expected real short term interest rates in the implementation of federal reserve policy the issue of rationality of inflation expectations that is the extent to which agents form expectations without making systematic mistakes in their beliefs about what inflation will be is important if inflation expectations are formed rationally labor and financial markets will strongly tend to neutralize the potential redistributive effects of inflation over time financial capital will flow efficiently within and across national borders moreover some of the stronger claims of new classical macroeconomics like the claim that only unexpected monetary policy actions will

expectations and the stability problem for optimal monetary policies eine auf den fundamentaldaten beruhende regelbindung der geldpolitik ohne selbstverpflichtung die bei vollkommen rationalen erwartungen der privaten akteure optimal ware ist instabil wenn diese akteure de facto den ublichen regeln des adaptiven lernens folgen dieses problem lasst sich dadurch beheben dass die erwartungen privater akteure berucksichtigt und in geeigneter weise in die optimale geldpolitik einbezogen werden diese eindeutige schlusfolgerung gilt auch dann wenn sich der geldpolitische entscheidungstrager und die privaten akteure in einem simultanen lernprozess befinden unsere ergebnisse zeigen wie wichtig es ist die geldpolitik angemessen zu gestalten und dabei nicht nur die fundamentaldaten sondern auch direkt die beobachteten erwartungen privater haushalte und unternehmen zu berucksichtigen

terms of trade policy in a model with non produced means of production abstract terms of trade policies between agriculture and industry are analysed in a two sector sraffian model if both sectors use only produced means of production and labor it can be shown that an improvement in agriculture s terms of trade always leads to higher profits in agriculture however when non produced means of production are introduced an exogenous increase in the relative price of agricultural commodities may cause the rate of profit in agriculture to increase remain constant or even decrease two preconditions are identified for the case in which a favorable movement in agriculture s terms of trade decreases that sector s profit rate first at least one quality of competitively priced land must be scarce relative to the total output required second the initial economy wide rate of profit must be positive finally the effect of an input subsidy used in conjunction with terms of trade policy is considered it is shown that under certain conditions reducing the price of production inputs can also cause profits to fall and rents to rise in agriculture

disagreement and biases in inflation expectations empirical work documents substantial disagreement in inflation expectations obtained from survey data furthermore the extent of such disagreement varies systematically over time in a way that reflects the level and variance of current inflation this paper oers a simple explanation for these facts based on asymmetries in the forecasters costs of over and under predicting inflation our model implies biased forecasts with positive serial correlation in forecast errors and a cross sectional dispersion that rises with the level and the variance of the inflation rate it also implies that forecast errors at dierent horizons can be predicted through the spread between the short and long term variance of inflation we find empirically that these patterns are present in inflation forecasts from the survey of professional forecasters a constant bias component not explained by asymmetric loss and rational expectations is required to explain the shift in the sign of the bias observed for a substantial portion of forecasters around 1982

contingent labor contracting under demand and supply uncertainty firms increasingly use contingent labor to flexibly respond to demand in many environments labor supply agencies are growing to fill this need as a result firms and agencies are engaging in long term contracts for labor supply we develop mathematical models of the interaction between firms and labor supply agencies when demand and supply are uncertain we consider two models of labor supply uncertainty termed productivity and availability uncertainty and study how each affects the nature of the contracts formed these models reflect two major roles played by the labor supply agency in the case of productivity uncertainty we find that it is possible to construct a contract that coordinates the firm and agency hiring in an optimal way in contrast we show that in environments characterized by availability uncertainty optimal contracts are not possible however there is a large range of contract parameters for which both parties would benefit from a contract we analyze these and discuss the trade offs that should be considered in contract negotiation

terms of trade and class conflict in a computable general equilibrium model for mexico a computable general equilibrium model for mexico is constructed in which class conflict over the distribution of the surplus is the principal determinant of the terms of trade the model consists of seven social classes and eight productive sectors classes are distinguished as fundamental or subsumed according to whether their incomes are primarily determined by conscious class struggle or by the resulting system of relative prices flexible prices are assumed to clear markets for which non produced means of production such as agricultural land limit supply while output in the remaining sectors is determined by the level of effective demand for the latter sectors two theories of price formation are compared and are seen to differ radically in their implicit conception of the nature of class conflict a keynes kalecki closure is considered in which prices are determined by a fixed mark up on costs this enables capitalists to protect themselves from incursions on the rate of profit due to labou

is inflation sticky abstract new keynesian sticky price models predict that monetary policy can affect real variables however they also predict that inflation can be reduced without depressing output or employment in fact bringing down inflation is costly presenting a challenge to the new keynesian model two departures from the new keynesian model predict costly disinflation one assumes sticky inflation rather than sticky prices while the other assumes less than perfectly rational expectations taking into account information from surveys of inflation expectations i find the evidence suggests that inflation is not sticky and that inflation expectations are less than perfectly rational

inflation expectations as a policy tool abstract we assess the prospects for central banks using inflation expectations as a policy tool for stabilization purposes we review recent work on how expectations of agents are formed and how they affect their economic decisions empirical evidence suggests that inflation expectations of households and firms affect their actions but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear especially for firms two additional limitations prevent policy makers from being able to actively manage inflation expectations first available surveys of firms expectations are systematically deficient which can only be addressed through the creation of large nationally representative surveys of firms second neither households nor firms expectations respond much to monetary policy announcements in low inflation environments we provide suggestions for how monetary policy makers could pierce this veil of inattention through new communication strategies as well as the potential pitfalls to trying to do so

inattentive consumers and international business cycles this paper presents and studies the properties of a sticky information exchange rate model where consumers and producers update their information sets infrequently introducing inattentive consumers has important implications through a mechanism resembling the limited participation models exchange rate volatility observed in the data can be addressed for reasonable values of risk aversion the model generates more persistence in output consumption and employment which brings us closer to the data impulse responses to monetary shocks are hump shaped consistent with the empirical evidence forecast errors of inattentive consumers provide a channel to reduce the correlation of relative consumption and real exchange rate the decline in the correlation is quantitatively small for our benchmark model model generates a substantial amount of consumer forecast errors when producers are attentive and productivity shocks are persistent this specification results in a large decline of the correlation of real exchange rate and relative consumption due to consumer inattentiveness when trade elasticity is set to values at the low end of macro estimates or at higher values consistent with sectoral estimates the correlation is in the negative territory with inattentive consumers

inattentive professional forecasters abstract using the ecb survey of professional forecasters to characterize expectations at the micro level we emphasize two new facts forecasters i fail to systematically update their forecasts and ii disagree even when updating it is moreover found that forecasters have predictable forecast errors these facts are qualitatively supportive of recent models of inattention and suggest a setup where agents imperfectly process information due to both sticky information a la mankiw reis and noisy information a la sims however building and estimating such an expectation model we find that it cannot quantitatively replicate the error and disagreement observed in the data

what can survey forecasts tell us about information rigidities a lot we derive common and conflicting predictions from models in which agents face information constraints and then assess their validity using surveys of consumers firms central bankers and professional forecasters we document that mean forecasts fail to completely adjust on impact to shocks leading to statistically and economically significant deviations from the null of full information the dynamics of forecast errors after shocks are consistent with the predictions of models with information rigidities the conditional responses of forecast errors and disagreement among agents can also be used to differentiate between some of the most prominent models of information rigidities

structural reforms animal spirits and monetary policies abstract we use a new keynesian behavioral macroeconomic model to analyze how structural reforms affect the economy there are two types of structural reforms the first one increases price flexibility the second one increases competition in the labor market and raises potential output we find that in a rigid economy business cycle movements are dominated by movements of animal spirits increasing price flexibility reduces the power of animal spirits and the boom bust nature of the business cycle we study the trade offs between output and inflation volatility faced by the central bank we find that flexibility improves these trade offs making it easier for the central bank to stabilize output and inflation

optimizing the use of contingent labor when demand is uncertain abstract we develop a new model for flexible workforce management in environments with uncertainty in the demand for labor in particular we model a workforce comprised of regular workers who have fixed schedules and may work overtime and contingent workers whose working hours are flexible as specified by a contract over a finite planning horizon our model can represent a variety of contracts including temporary workers on call workers with guaranteed minimum pay and comp time arrangements we formulate the model as an optimization problem that determines the regular and contingent worker pool sizes that minimize expected labor and backlog costs embedded within this problem is a dynamic programming problem of making optimal operational staffing decisions with respect to the utilization of contingent and overtime resources numerical examples demonstrate the effect that the timing of information has on the benefits of flexibility we also derive structural results that may be exploited to reduce the computational effort required to use the model

new keynesian economics and the phillips curve models with sticky prices are an important part of new keynesian economics the author shows that several of the new keynesian models imply a formulation that is similar to the expectations augmented phillips curve of milton friedman and edmund phelps he then presents new estimates of the new keynesian phillips curve the author uses two proxies for price expectations survey based measures and an econometric based measure originally developed by bennett mccallum 1976 overall the results are consistent with the model but the survey based results are more precise suggesting that the surveys may be better measures of actual expectations copyright 1995 by ohio state university press

management economics in a large retail company we use unique data from 245 stores of a uk retailer to study links among middle store manager skills sales and manager pay we find that of the six management practice areas surveyed the most important is commercial awareness where abler managers achieve up to 13 9 higher sales per worker we find that many stores have poor managers on this indicator however the company is careful to incentivize managers operating a scheme giving shares approximately 20 in both positive and negative deviations of actual sales from expected abler managers do not receive higher pay implying that their skills are company specific

the effects of professional forecast dissemination on macroeconomic volatility abstract this paper explores the role that professional forecast announcements can have on macroeconomic volatility bounded rational agents are used inside a medium scale dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge model with financial frictions modeled agents must form expectations about endogenous variables by selecting between three simple linear forecasting specifications some of which contain the inclusion of a professionally announced forecast of the economic variable historically calibrated simulations of the model show that the usage of the announced professional forecast by the agents in their adaptive learning forecast specifications can reduce the volatility in consumption inflation and wages by as much as 26 23 and 22 respectively however if the professional forecast is not disseminated well to the agents or biased in its dissemination agents will learn to ignore the announcement and macroeconomic volatility will increase further the inclusion of very noisy professional forecast signals can result in coordinated volatility cascades where agents could reduce macroeconomic volatility by ignoring the professional forecast but choose not to because of its previous forecast performance

capacity investment under uncertainty the effect of volume flexibility abstract real option theory is a central tool in today s investment theory as it integrates uncertainty and managerial flexibility in the analysis and valuation of investment projects this paper studies the optimal time and size of investment for a monopolistic firm under demand uncertainty and volume flexibility in our modeling framework demand is random and the firm first decides the optimal time and size of the production process after entry the firm adjusts continuously production volume to match the observed demand volume flexibility comes at a cost which depends on both the current output and the established capacity we study two different models of volume flexibility downside volume flexibility allows the firms to produce any quantity below the installed capacity upside volume flexibility allows to expand production above the firm s capacity size in both cases the option to temporary suspend production is not given a priori but it is part of the firm s optimal choice with this feature the model provides conclusions that contrast some of the most recent theoretical findings on the same subject we find that an increase of the degree of downside volume flexibility makes the firm willing to invest earlier in a larger plant we also show that downside volume flexibility reduces the utilization rates especially in highly uncertain markets upside volume flexibility has the joint effect of reducing the size of the investment and the investment threshold at which the firm installs capacity the utilization rates are significantly higher compared to the case of downside volume flexibility only and there is an increasing relationship between increased upside flexibility and utilization rates

comparing the point predictions and subjective probability distributions of professional forecasters we use data from the survey of professional forecasters spf to compare point predictions of gross domestic product gdp growth and inflation with the subjective probability distributions held by forecasters we find that most spf point predictions are quite close to the central tendencies of forecasters subjective distributions tend to be asymmetric with spf forecasters tending to report point predictions that give a more favorable view of the economy than do their subjective means medians modes

macroeconomic expectations of households and professional forecasters economists have long emphasized the importance of expectations in determining macroeconomic outcomes yet there has been almost no recent effort to model actual empirical expectations data instead m acroeconomists usually simply assume that expectations are rational this paper shows that while empirical household expectations are not rational in the usual sense expectational dynamics are well captured by a model in which households views derive from news reports of the views of professional forecasters which in turn may be rational the model s estimates imply that people only occasionally pay attention to news reports this inattention generates stickyness in aggregate expectations with important macroeconomic consequences

asymmetric preferences and the stability problem for optimal monetary policy rules this paper evaluates the stability properties of optimal monetary policy rules when professionals under adaptive learning have asymmetric preferences the asymmetric preferences require volatility estimates in real time an expectations based rule can stabilize the economy while a fundamentals based rule leads to instability

a simple recursive forecasting model abstract we compare the performance of alternative recursive forecasting models a simple constant gain algorithm used widely in the learning literature both forecasts well out of sample and also provides the best fit to the survey of professional forecasters

heterogeneous information quality strategic complementarities and optimal policy design abstract the beauty contest framework of morris and shin 2002 is extended to allow sub groups within the population of agents to differ in the quality i e precision of their private information we discuss the inefficiency of the resulting model s equilibrium and assess the relative effectiveness in remedying this inefficiency of i a pigouvian tax scheme ii direct policy intervention by means of an instrument which can modify the state of the world the disclosure policy implications of each of these two policy approaches are also analyzed

experimental evidence on inflation expectation formation using laboratory experiments within a new keynesian sticky price framework we study the process of inflation expectation formation we focus on adaptive learning and rational expectations contrary to the previous literature that mostly studied simple heuristics using a test for rational expectations that allows heterogeneity of expectations we find that we cannot reject rationality for about 40 of subjects more than 20 of subjects are also best described by adaptive learning models where they behave like econometricians and update their model estimates every period however rather than using a single forecasting model switching between models describes their behavior better switching is more likely to occur when experimental economy is in a recession

the structure of expectations of the weekly money supply announcement abstract this paper examines the structure of expectations of the weekly money supply announcement in the late 1970s the data used are from a weekly telephone survey of money market participants the rationality and structure of expectations are explored with the data organized in three ways the mean response to each weekly survey the pooled sample of individual responses and time series of responses by each individual in the survey the effect of data aggregation on rationality tests is investigated the structure of the expectations data are also examined and it is found that both strong regressive influences and adaptive learning characterize the data

non produced means of production in sraffa s system basics non basics and quasi basics all value land and other non produced means of production can make no contribution to the value of commodities rent is consequently a deduction from the total surplus produced by labour although the labour theory of value has been the subject of extensive criticism for more than a century the associated issues of non produced means of production1 have been largely ignored indeed steedman 1977 who argues that the entire apparatus be abandoned and replaced with sraffa s 1960 theory of production prices makes no refer ence to the problem of rent this paper investigates the extent to which the classical intuition regarding non produced means of production is consistent with sraffa s system in production of commodities by means of commodities sraffa provides a rigorous refor mulation of the classical theories of intensive and extensive rent noting that land and natural resources occupy among means of production a position equivalent to that of non basics among products in single product systems non basics are typically interpreted as luxury goods and it can be shown inter alia that technical progress in non basic industries does not affect the system of relative prices and the economy wide rate of profit if it is true that land is always non basic then we might conclude that the classical view is broadly confirmed by sraffa s modernisation of the theory of value unfortunately both the extensive and intensive systems are formally multiple product process economies for which the definition of non basics is considerably more subtle and complex than in single product industries 2 important properties of single product non basics do not always survive the transition to multiple product economies prices and profits may respond in unexpected ways to technical change taxes and class conflict over the distribution of the surplus the source of the perverse behaviour is traced to a class of commodities characterised here as quasi basics the paper is organised as follows in section 2 we show that in systems with extensive

state dependent pricing and the general equilibrium dynamics of money and output economists have long suggested that nominal product prices are changed infrequently because of fixed costs in such a setting optimal price adjustment should depend on the state of the economy yet while widely discussed statedependent pricing has proved difficult to incorporate into macroeconomic models this paper develops a new tractable theoretical state dependent pricing framework we use it to study how optimal pricing depends on the persistence of monetary shocks the elasticities of labor supply and goods demand and the interest sensitivity of money demand

sticky information the impact of different information updating assumptions vector auto regressions applied to u s data find that inflation and output experience persistent and hump shaped responses to unanticipated monetary shocks one monetary model that can generate these responses employs sticky information under sticky information a firm may costlessly change its nominal price every period however the firm can only occasionally update the information upon which it bases decisions we show that this result hinges critically on the assumption that each firm receives information updates randomly if on the other hand each firm updates its information at infrequent but fixed intervals a the output response is not persistent and only weakly hump shaped under one year price contracts b the inflation response suffers diminished persistence and a reduced hump shape c the inflation response remains unrealistic under longer durations

information induced heteroscedasticity in price expectations data this study tests the hypothesis that price expectations differ across individuals because they acquire different information about inflation if price information is a normal good then the amount of price information acquired will vary across individuals according to income education and other demand specific variables causing price expectations to be heteroscedastic with respect to these variables utilizing monthly household survey data the authors test the heteroscedasticity hypothesis and find support for the differential information model in addition they develop a novel method of incorporating the don t know response to questions about inflation into the estimation of price expectations copyright 1990 by mit press

implications of rational inattention abstract a constraint that actions can depend on observations only through a communication channel with finite shannon capacity is shown to be able to play a role very similar to that of a signal extraction problem or an adjustment cost in standard control problems the resulting theory looks enough like familiar dynamic rational expectations theories to suggest that it might be useful and practical while the implications for policy are different enough to be interesting

monetary policy expectations and commitment commitment in monetary policy leads to equilibria that are superior to those from optimal discretionary policies a number of interest rate reaction functions and instrument rules have been proposed to implement or approximate commitment policy we assess these rules in terms of whether they lead to a rational expectations equilibrium that is both locally determinate and stable under adaptive learning by private agents a reaction function that appropriately depends explicitly on private sector expectations performs particularly well on both counts

the nairu unemployment and monetary policy this paper examines the precision of conventional estimates of the nairu and the role of the nairu and unemployment in forecasting inflation the authors find that although there is a clear empirical phillips relation the nairu is imprecisely estimated forecasts of inflation are insensitive to the nairu and there are other leading indicators of inflation that are at least as good as unemployment this suggests deemphasizing the nairu in public discourse about monetary policy and instead drawing on a richer variety of leading indicators of inflation

models of inflation expectations formation a comparison of household and economist forecasts comment in the third section of his paper models of inflation expectations formation a comparison of household and economist forecasts gramlich 1983 presents statistics suggesting that two survey measures of inflation expectations are biased and inefficient in this comment we show that the main results presented in his table 1 are generated using a misspecified model when the specification error is corrected we find that the michigan survey of household inflation expectations passes the standard tests for unbiasedness and weak tests for efficiency 1 however there remains doubt about the properties of the inflation expectation series derived from the livingston survey of professional economists 2 the particular results we review were presumably generated from ordinary leastsquares ols estimation of the following equation equation 2 in gramlich