affordable care act following its enactment. some of this analysis relies on the ability of our survey to shed light on whether consumers expect a specific change in economic conditions to be temporary or permanent. a second important feature of the survey is that — in addition to simple point forecasts — for some variables, such as inflation, we get respondents ’ entire forecast distributions by asking them to assign probabilities to various ranges of future outcomes. these so - called density forecasts in turn allow us to measure households ’ uncertainty about future events by looking at the spread in their subjective distributions. density forecasts also allow us to monitor the perceived likelihood that respondents assign to specific events, such as deflation or a large increase in earnings. a third important characteristic of the sce is that it is a rotating panel. each month about 1, 300 household heads participate in our survey. this is a nationally representative sample. respondents remain on the panel for up to 12 months, with a constant fraction entering and rotating out each month. this allows us to monitor the expectations of the same respondents over time, which provides important benefits. first, it gives us greater confidence that month - tomonth changes in our headline numbers reflect true changes in beliefs, and not just changes in the sample composition. second, observing repeated responses by the same individuals allows us to examine how expectations are formed and revised over time. third, by following the same people over time, we are able to study how expectations are related to contemporaneous and future economic decisions and outcomes for these respondents. today the sce team will provide further background about the survey, discuss newly released findings for october and recent trends in some of its main indicators. the team will then present findings from two special components of the sce : one that covers households ’ credit experiences and expectations, and one that deals with labor market behavior and expectations. before i pass this on to my colleagues, i would like to comment briefly on these two special surveys. new findings on credit access the sce credit access survey supplements the information collected in the federal reserve board ’ s senior loan officer opinion survey on bank lending practices, also known as sloos. the sloos is a primary source of information on credit standards and credit demand as perceived and reported by banks. in contrast, the sce credit access survey, which has been 2 / 3 bis central bankers'speeches conducted at a four - month frequency since october 2013, measures experiences in credit markets as perceived by households. the

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. by collecting data on a broad range of expectations, it is possible to analyze how they interact with each other and jointly influence households ’ decisions. we also study how expectations vary with demographics and other household characteristics. the broad scope of the sce allows us to study many questions relevant to economic policy — such as understanding housing market decisions, disentangling credit demand from supply, analyzing job search behavior and measuring wage growth as people transition between jobs. in addition, the survey has been used to help answer other policy - relevant questions as they have come up in our discussions. two examples are households ’ spending response to the decrease in gas prices in early 2014, and households ’ early experiences and perceptions of the