Survey-based household inflation expectations. Are they valid? A multi-group confirmatory factor analysis approach

We present evidence that micro-level household inflation expectations are influenced by consumer confidence. To account for this impact, using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis, we measure the intertemporal consistency of a model comprising both consumer confidence and inflation expectations. We determine that the model exhibits the property of partial measurement invariance. Thus, we are able to account reliably for the influence of consumer confidence on inflation expectations and, simultaneously, to obtain corrected inflation expectations at the household level. It appears that, after correcting for the level of confidence, average inflation expectations at each point in time become significantly more similar to the average inflation expectations of professional forecasters and more correlated with average consumer confidence. Our analysis is based on household survey data from Poland’s State of the Households’ Survey (from 2000Q1 to 2012Q1), which is conducted in line with the European Commission’s methodology.