FOMC Forecasts as a Focal Point for Private Expectations
研究了美联储公开市场委员会（FOMC）发布通胀预测是否降低了私人通胀预期的分散程度，发现发布预测确实减少了私人对当年通胀预测的差异，且这一效果不受FOMC内部分歧影响。
We explore empirically the theoretical prediction that public information acts as a focal point in the context of the U.S. monetary policy. We aim at establishing whether the publication of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) inflation forecasts affects the cross‐sectional dispersion of private inflation expectations. Our main finding is that publishing FOMC inflation forecasts has a negative effect on the cross‐sectional dispersion of private current‐year inflation forecasts. This effect is found to be robust to another survey data set and to various macroeconomic controls. Moreover, we find that the dispersion of private inflation forecasts is not affected by the dispersion of views among FOMC members.