What drives inflation expectations in Brazil? Public versus private information

This article applies a noisy information model with strategic interactions à la Morris and Shin (2002) to a panel from the Central Bank of Brazil Market Expectations System to provide evidence of how professional forecasters weight private and public information when building inflation expectations in Brazil. The main results are: (i) forecasters attach more weight to public information than private information because (ii) public information is more precise than private information. Nevertheless, (iii) forecasters overweight private information in order to (iv) differentiate themselves from each other (strategic substitutability).

JEL classification: D82, D83, E31, F31

Keywords: incomplete information, public information, coordination, complementarities, externalities