Timo Reinelt

This paper provides new survey evidence on firms’ inflation expectations in the euro area. Building on the ECB’s Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises (SAFE), we introduce consistent measurement of inflation expectations across countries and shed new light on the properties and causal effects of these expectations. We find considerable heterogeneity in firms’ inflation expectations and show that firms disagree about future inflation more than professional forecasters but less than households. We document that differences in firms’ demographics, firms’ choices and
constraints, and cross-country macroeconomic environments account for most of the variation in inflation expectations by roughly equal shares. Using an RCT approach, we show that firms update their inflation expectations in a Bayesian manner. Moreover, they revise their plans regarding prices, wages, costs and employment in response to information treatments about current or future inflation.

We study the pass-through of corporate taxes into consumer prices, leveraging 1,058 municipal tax rate changes affecting 4,754 German firms. A 1 p.p. increase in a producer’s tax rate raises retail prices by 0.3% on average, consistent with imperfectly competitive producers. Product-level pass-through varies substantially, as it increases in destination-specific product and retailer-category market shares. We find little evidence linking heterogeneous passthrough to differences in retailer efficiency as reflected in relative consumer prices. Instead, our findings align with standard non-CES preferences where pass through increasing with market shares implies weaker strategic complementarities in price setting than when this relationship is reversed.

Does a successful disinflation contribute to the anchoring of inflation expectations? We provide novel survey evidence on the dynamics of euro area firms’ inflation expectations during the disinflation episode since 2022. We show that firms’ short-term inflation expectations declined steadily towards the inflation target as the disinflation progressed. However, we also document a thick tail in longer-term inflation expectations, substantial disagreement about the inflation outlook, and an increased sensitivity of longer-term inflation expectations to short-term inflation expectations. These findings suggest that it may take more time to bring inflation expectations fully in line with central bank objectives.

We provide novel empirical evidence that firms’ investment is more responsive to monetary policy when a higher fraction of their debt matures. In a heterogeneous firm New Keynesian model with financial frictions and endogenous debt maturity, two channels explain this finding: (1.) Firms with more maturing debt have larger roll-over needs and are therefore more exposed to fluctuations in the real interest rate (roll-over risk). (2.) These firms also have higher default risk and therefore react more strongly to changes in the real burden of outstanding nominal debt (debt overhang). Unconventional monetary policy, which operates through long-term interest rates, has larger effects on debt maturity but smaller effects on output and inflation than conventional monetary policy.

U.S. households’ housing price expectations deviate systematically from full-information rational expectations: (i) expectations are updated on average too sluggishly, (ii) expectations initially underreact but subsequently overreact to housing price changes, and (iii) households are overly optimistic (pessimistic) about housing price growth when the price-to-rent ratio is high (low). We show that weak forms of housing price growth extrapolation allow to simultaneously replicate the behavior of housing prices and these deviations from rational expectations as an equilibrium outcome. Embedding housing price growth extrapolation into a sticky price model with a lower-bound constraint on nominal interest rates, we show that lower natural rates of interest increase the volatility of housing prices and thereby the volatility of the natural rate of interest. This exacerbates the relevance of the lower bound constraint and causes Ramsey optimal inflation to increase strongly with a decline in the natural rate of interest.

U.S. households’ housing price expectations deviate systematically from full-information rational expectations: (i) expectations are updated on average too sluggishly, (ii) expectations initially underreact but subsequently overreact to housing price changes, and (iii) households are overly optimistic (pessimistic) about housing price growth when the price-to-rent ratio is high (low). We show that weak forms of housing price growth extrapolation allow to simultaneously replicate the behavior of housing prices and these deviations from rational expectations as an equilibrium outcome. Embedding housing price growth extrapolation into a sticky price model with a lower-bound constraint on nominal interest rates, we show that lower natural rates of interest increase the volatility of housing prices and thereby the volatility of the natural rate of interest. This exacerbates the relevance of the lower bound constraint and causes Ramsey optimal inflation to increase strongly with a decline in the natural rate of interest.

We study the role of markup dispersion and aggregate TFP for monetary transmission. Empirically, we show that the response of markup dispersion to monetary policy shocks can account for a significant fraction of the aggregate TFP response in the first two years after the shock. Analytically, we show that heterogeneous price rigidity can explain the response of markup dispersion if firms have a precautionary price-setting motive, which is present in common New Keynesian environments. We provide empirical evidence in support of this explanation. Finally, we study the mechanism and its implications in a quantitative model.

Does a successful disinflation contribute to the anchoring of inflation expectations? We provide novel survey evidence on the dynamics of euro area firms’ inflation expectations during the disinflation episode since 2022. We show that firms’ short-term inflation expectations declined steadily towards the inflation target as the disinflation progressed. However, we also document a thick tail in longer-term inflation expectations, substantial disagreement about the inflation outlook, and an increased sensitivity of longer-term inflation expectations to short-term inflation expectations. These findings suggest that it may take more time to bring inflation expectations fully in line with central bank objectives.