Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2018
Real-time supervision of shifts in inflation expectations is an important issue for monetary policy makers, especially in the presence of economic uncertainty. In this paper, we elaborate tools for on-line monitoring of such shifts by extracting valuable information from noisy daily financial market data. For this purpose, first, we suggest a new risk adjustment for observable proxies of medium and long run inflation expectations assuming that the latter are well-anchored. Second, we propose an econometric methodology for sequential monitoring of level changes in the associated proxies at daily frequency. Our empirical evidence shows that the on-line surveillance of risk adjusted US forward breakeven inflation rates by means of the cumulative sum (CUSUM) detector appears to be helpful to extract timely signals on potential shifts. In particular, the obtained signals indicate important turning points in market-based measures of inflation expectations, which also tend to materialize in lower frequency experts' surveys.
This research has been in part financially supported by the Collaborative Research Center “Statistical modeling of nonlinear dynamic processes” (SFB 823, Teilprojekt A1) of the German Research Foundation (DFG). We are also indebted to two anonymous referees as well as to the associate editor for their helpful and constructive remarks and suggestions.