By using Michigan and SPF surveys, this thesis compares the group-level inflation-forecast performance as well as information transmission between two main market participation groups, consumers and professional forecasters. Group-level performance are in terms of forecasting different U.S. inflation indexes and evaluated using forecast accuracy measured by RMSE as well as predictive power tested by a linear model. In addition, consumers are decomposed into three sub-groups based on educational attainment and income distribution to explore within-group heterogeneity. The results indicate that both consumer groups and professionals show poor forecast performance for all the inflation measures, except professionals’ performance for CPI-Core. Further, gathering downward-biased inflation forecasts from professionals is a possible reason that contributes to highly educated consumers’ inflation-forecast performance for price changes of expenditure categories they care.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:NSHD.ca#10222/50409 |
| Date | 16 April 2014 |
| Creators | Yang, Yang |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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