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 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.
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.