注意力依赖型货币对家庭信仰的传导

Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C.ISSN 1936-2854 (Print)ISSN 2767-3898 (Online) Attention-Dependent Monetary Transmission to HouseholdBeliefs Jaemin Jeong, Eunseong Ma, Choongryul Yang 2025-084 NOTE: Staff working papers in the Finance and Economics Discussion Series (FEDS) are preliminarymaterials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment.The analysis and conclusions set forthare those of the authors and do not indicate concurrence by other members of the research staff or theBoard of Governors. References in publications to the Finance and Economics Discussion Series (other thanacknowledgement) should be cleared with the author(s) to protect the tentative character of these papers. Attention-Dependent Monetary Transmission toHousehold Beliefs∗ Jaemin Jeong†Duke UniversityEunseong Ma‡Yonsei UniversityChoongryul Yang§Federal Reserve Board September 2025 Abstract When do households listen to the Fed? We show the answer lies in a simple but powerfulforce: household attention to macroeconomic conditions. We develop a model where atten-tion acts as a crucial gatekeeper for the pass-through of policy news to beliefs, and confirmits predictions using household survey data. We find that belief revisions to monetary policysurprises are concentrated among attentive individuals—particularly those with high finan-cial stakes—and this effect strengthens dramatically during uncertain times. This implies theexpectations channel is most potent when it matters most, suggesting policymakers shouldaccount for the time-varying and heterogeneous nature of public attention. Keywords: Inflation expectations, Monetary policy, Rational inattention, Behavioral macroe-conomicsJEL Codes: D83, D84, E31, E52 1Introduction Central banks emphasize expectations as an important channel of monetary transmission.Yet when households actually update their inflation beliefs in response to policy news—andwhich households do so—has been hard to pin down empirically. This paper studies whenhouseholds “listen” to the Fed. Our central claim is that attention to macroeconomic conditionsis a key, heterogeneous, and time-varying determinant of the pass-through from conventionalmonetary policy (MP) surprises to household inflation expectations. We combine a simple modelof endogenous attention with new micro and time-series evidence from a long-running U.S.household survey and externally identified policy shocks. Four key results emerge: attentiongatesthe individual-level impact of MP on beliefs; aggregate pass-through scales with the economy’saverage attentiveness; the effect strengthens in periods of elevated uncertainty; and the responseis largest for households with higher payoffs to being informed. We begin with a minimal behavioral framework, following Gabaix (2020), in which eachhousehold chooses an attention level prior to the arrival of shocks and forms expectations as anattention-weighted combination of a long-run anchor and the fully informed forecast. Attentionbalances forecast-loss reductions against mental costs and is increasing in thepayoff-relevantnews variance—the volatility of monetary and non-monetary disturbances that would movethe fully informed forecast. The model delivers four testable implications: (i) only the attentivecomponent of beliefs loads on policy news (attention gates pass-through); (ii) aggregate pass-through in time series is proportional to average attentiveness; (iii) higher uncertainty raisesattention and therefore amplifies belief responses to policy; and (iv) pass-through is larger forhouseholds with higher payoffs to information (e.g., stockholders and homeowners), consistentwith a higher benefit parameter in the model. We then take these predictions to the data using the Michigan Survey of Consumers (MSC).Exploiting its rotating panel, we construct a predetermined attentiveness indicator by contrastingrespondents’ assessments of recent business conditions with an external benchmark. Monetarypolicy surprises are identified with high-frequency methods. Our empirical strategy tests eachof the model’s predictions: we begin with a micro event-study of the effect of conventional MPsurprises on revisions in one-year-ahead inflation expectations, followed by a time-series regres-sion that tests the scaling with aggregate attentiveness. We then analyze state dependence byinteracting shocks with macro uncertainty and, finally, test the payoff-heterogeneity predictionsusing household characteristics including stockholding, homeownership, age, and income. Four sets of findings align closely with the model’s predictions. First, in the micro data, acontractionary shock reduces one-year-ahead inflation expectationsonlyamong respondentsclassified as attentive; the estimate for inattentive respondents is small and statistically indistin- guishable from zero. This individual-level pattern is the attention-gated pass-through predictedby the model and directly links policy surprises to belief upd