Emerging patterns in inflation expectations with multiple agents

Abstract

Macroeconomic theory and central Banks' policy recommendations have analyzed for decades the link between the expected value of future inflation and its subsequent realization. Agents' inflation expectations have thus become a fundamental input of the economic policy: they allow to know if economic agents are synchronized with the policies and allow the Central Banks to anticipate the market trends. In this paper, we found evidence for the case of Uruguay of a discrepancy between the distribution of agents' inflation expectations and the distribution expected by traditional models. A first consequence is an increase in uncertainty in the estimates; problems related to its asymptotic distribution and the assumptions that arise from this aggregate distribution are analyzed. Another consequence is related to the existence of a structure in the data and the notion of equilibrium in the model. It is concluded that a discussion regarding the nature of the economic phenomenon is essential for the correct specification of the model studied.