Moreover, recent work by Yuriy Gorodnichenko and our keynote speaker Olivier Coibion has shown that household surveys can, in some instances, provide better information about firms’ expectations than professional forecasts or market-based inflation expectations. [7] For example, disagreement among firms about macroeconomic prospects resembles the dispersion of expectations among households in terms of its size, persistence and asymmetry.
But household expectations are also of direct importance to the monetary transmission process. Households’ inflation expectations, for instance, are related to their purchase intentions and can therefore affect private consumption. Furthermore, household expectations on economic variables other than inflation are also relevant to central banks. If conducted at the national level, additional household surveys could focus on and detect idiosyncratic features.