Inflation Expectations Revisited

This paper describes the construction and main features of a new monthly time series for the mean and standard deviation of consumer inflation expectations in the United Kingdom in the years 1961-85, based on a number of consumer surveys. This involves generalizing to four- and five-category tendency survey data the method used by J. A. Carlson and M. Parkin (1975) to quantify the results of a three-category tendency survey of inflation expectations. The new series exhibit very different time series properties from the original Carlson-Parkin data. Copyright 1988 by The London School of Economics and Political Science.