Therefore, a fuller understanding of such outcomes requires reliable data on the beliefs and intentions held by economic agents and how they evolve over time. In particular, consumer expectations influence a variety of considerations, including spending and saving behavior, wage dynamics, job search, housing demand and the demand for credit. Given their importance in determining U.S. economic activity, consumer expectations are of particular value in assessing the economic outlook and the related risks. Over the last decade, we have devoted significant resources to improving the measurement of the economic expectations of households. This work culminated in the creation of the Survey of Consumer Expectations, or SCE, in 2013. The expectations data collected in our survey give us direct insight into households’ decision-making and consumers’ financial and economic outlooks. While we monitor expectations on a number of topics, of particular importance are households’ medium-term inflation expectations. Having reliable measures of inflation expectations is crucial to assess the effectiveness of monetary policy and central bank communications. Such an assessment focuses on analyzing the extent to which longer-run inflation expectations remain well-anchored, and on learning more about how agents update and revise their expectations in response to new information. The SCE allows us to carry out this sort of analysis. Besides their obvious policy relevance, the SCE data are also highly valuable for research. Our economists have shown that the SCE’s expectations data are informative and predictive of respondents’ current and future behavior.

They have also documented the substantial heterogeneity in the formation and updating of expectations across demographic groups. To facilitate further research, we make the survey data available in the Center for Microeconomic Data section of our website. Each month we also illustrate the trends in our expectations series through easy-to-use, interactive charts. Further, a number of our Liberty Street Economics blog posts describe the data and the analysis we have conducted. We do this because we want researchers, policymakers, commentators and the general public to understand the data and to follow our updates. Let me now describe our Survey of Consumer Expectations in more detail. 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  The Survey of Consumer Expectations Following extensive design and testing, we launched the Survey of Consumer Expectations in June 2013. The survey has a number of innovative and unique features, three of which I would like to highlight today. First and foremost, as I mentioned earlier, it collects households’ subjective expectations and intentions on a wide range of economic outcomes and behaviors. In addition to short- and medium-term inflation expectations, it collects data on households’ expectations regarding the housing, labor and credit markets, as well as households’ financial situations and a host of other macroeconomic variables of interest. For example, the survey elicits beliefs about future wage growth, house price appreciation, job search and labor market transitions, households’ spending and income growth, and credit applications.