Understanding Macroeconomic Disagreement

We propose a new measure of macroeconomic disagreement, using dispersions of forecasts of a wide range of financial, activity and inflation variables from both household and professional surveys at various frequencies. With a mixed-frequency state-space model, we construct macroeconomic disagreement estimates of the one-year ahead expected state of the economy. Impulse responses show disagreement shocks lead to a contraction in economic activity, and monetary policy expansion reduces disagreement, implying that endogenous disagreement is an additional channel for countercyclical monetary policy.