Asymmetry of Individual and Aggregate Inflation Expectations: A Survey

We conducted a simple, anonymous survey at the beginning of 2014, asking around 200 economists worldwide to report their medium-term expectations about US inflation. A significant share of respondents revealed asymmetric inflation expectations with sizeable deviation from symmetry. We obtain an aggregate distribution that is moderately skewed to the right and show that the aggregate skewness is mostly driven by disagreement among respondents and not by asymmetry of their subjective distributions. In fact, ignoring individual asymmetry changes little in terms of mean and variance of the aggregate distribution.