In this paper we present the NBP Survey of Professional Forecasters introduced in 2011 by the National Bank of Poland. It is a new survey that allows analysis of macroeconomic forecasts of professional economists, including their probabilistic forecasts of CPI inflation, GDP growth and the NBP reference rate. In the paper we discuss in detail survey methodology, whose some elements are novel. It refers especially to the construction of probabilistic survey questions. Instead of declaring probabilities that in a certain horizon a given variable will be in pre-defined intervals, NBP SPF experts declare median and the limits of a 90-percent probability range between the 5th and 95th percentile of their subjective probability distributions. To present the benefits from the applied design of the NBP SPF, we describe the first results obtained from the NBP SPF.
Qualitative data on inflation perceptions and expectations, as obtained from surveys, can be quantified into numerical indicators of the perceived and expected rates of price change. This paper presents the results of different versions of probability and regression methods, implemented in order to estimate Polish consumer inflation perceptions and predictions, based on monthly consumer surveys. The paper also discusses the limited usefulness of quantitative questions, which occur to be excessively difficult for a significant part of respondents, whose numerical declarations are inconsistent with opinions expressed in a qualitative manner
This paper discusses measurement techniques used in the literature to quantify inflation perception and expectations on the basis of qualitative survey data. Description of quantification methods and assessment of their strengths and weaknesses is supplemented with an overview of direct measures of consumer inflation expectations in the European Union quantified with a number of techniques. Except presenting quantification methods, constraints in their interpretation and their results, the paper describes how direct measures of inflation expectations are used in central banks nowadays.
This paper presents survey-based direct measures of inflation expectations of consumers, enterprises and financial sector analysts in Poland. It then goes on to provide the results of testing those features of inflation expectations that seem the most important from the point of view of monetary policy and its transmission mechanism. The study is the revised version of the NBP Working Paper no. 115 [ Lyziak (2012)]. It uses new measures of consumer inflation expectations and covers the updated sample (2001- 2013). Characteristics of inflation expectations in Poland are diversified across the analysed groups of economic agents. Inflation expectations of financial sector analysts and enterprises outperform those of consumers in terms of their accuracy and information content, although consumer inflation expectations are also to some extent forward-looking.
We test whether the risk-taking channel of monetary policy transmission mechanism is active in Poland, an emerging market economy. Based on confidential bank-level data we construct novel measures of risk taken by banks, and exploit asymmetries in bank lending with respect to the level of the interest rate and across bank types in order to identify the risk-taking channel. Our results provide some evidence of the risk-taking behavior of Polish banks. However, only in the segment of large loans to non-financial corporations we are able to conclude that increased risk of new loans after lowering short-term interest rates represents supply-side phenomenon. We show that the loosening of monetary policy has different effects depending on the initial level of interest rates and this effect is different across banks, depending on their size, liquidity and funding structure. Our results contribute to the ongoing discussion on consequences of conducting monetary policy in the low interest rate environment as currently observed in many advanced and emerging economies.
This note extends the study by Lyziak et al. (2007), providing up-to-date assessment of central bank transparency in Poland. We highlight the role of inflation projections prepared by the staff of the National Bank of Poland in building transparency of monetary policy. The results suggest that central bank inflation projections, published since 2004, have led to improvements in the predictability of interest rate decisions. The note updates also previous estimates of the degree of central bank credibility in Poland, using survey-based measures of inflation expectations formed by consumers, enterprises and financial sector analysts. It is confirmed that inflation expectations of enterprises and – especially – of financial sector analysts display a high degree of anchoring at the NBP inflation target, while consumer inflation expectations are driven mainly by developments in subjectively perceived inflation. JEL: D84, E52, E58.
Using a novel approach based on micro-level survey responses, we assess the reliability of aggregated inflation expectations estimates in the European Commission Consumer Survey. We identify the share of consumers, whose qualitative and quantitative views on expected increase of prices do not match each other. Then we consider the impact of inconsistent survey responses on balance statistics and mean values of quantitative inflation expectations. We also analyze expectations’ formation estimating the sticky-information models. The results, based on Finnish and Polish data, suggest that even if the fraction of inconsistent survey responses is non-negligible, it matters neither for the aggregated figures of inflation views, nor for understanding of the formation of inflation expectations by consumers. We conclude that micro-level inconsistencies do not reduce the reliability of the current EC Consumer Survey dataset. Our results also indicate that inconsistent responses are not important drivers of the inflation overestimation bias displayed in the data.
Abstract By carefully matching the data sets from the Michigan Survey of Consumers with the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we show that there exists substantial heterogeneity in the propensity of U.S. households to learn from experts in forming inflation expectations. Additional results for a group of European economies broadly confirm this observation. We advance an extended version of the sticky‐information model to analyze disagreement in consumer inflation expectations. Besides differences in consumers' propensities to learn, disagreement in our model arises from heterogeneity in consumers' fundamental inflation and past expectations and experts' different views about future inflation.
This paper describes a preliminary version of the small inflation model of Mongolia (SIMOM). The intended primary use of the model is analysis of the monetary transmission mechanism and the inflation process in Mongolia, estimation of dynamic responses of selected variables to different shocks hitting the Mongolian economy as well as forecasting macroeconomic categories (e.g. exchange rate, output gap, inflation) over a medium term, consistent with the lags in the monetary transmission mechanism. Conclusions from the paper are the following: Mongolian inflation is driven by a large number of shocks, both internal and external. At the same time the effectiveness of the monetary transmission mechanism is relatively weak (although stronger than previously perceived). The exchange rate channel seems to be the most important channel of monetary transmission mechanism in Mongolia.
