Inflation narratives and expectations

I study how demand-supply narrative disagreement between general and specialized newspapers can explain households’ absolute gap in inflation expectations with experts. I measure inflation narratives via a Causality Extraction algorithm that can identify causal relationships between events in a text and, hence, extract the perceived triggers of inflation. Causal relations can explain why narratives affect people’s beliefs and cannot be captured by dictionary methods, topic models, and word embeddings. I then classify inflation narratives into demand and supply narratives based on their focus on demand and supply triggers. I measure narrative disagreement between general and specialized newspapers from their attention difference on demand and supply narratives. The absolute expectation gap widens when narrative disagreement increases, especially for non-college-educated and older households. Unlike the narratives of specialized newspapers, the narratives of general newspapers incorrectly align with experts’ demand-supply views.