A New Approach to Assess Inflation Expectations Anchoring Using Strategic Surveys

We propose a new approach to assess inflation expectations anchoring using “strategic surveys.” Namely, we measure households’ revisions in long-run inflation expectations after they are presented with different economic scenarios. This approach has a causal interpretation and maps directly into policy makers concerns. We implement the method in the summer of 2019 and the spring-summer of 2021 when the anchoring of long-run inflation expectations was questioned. We find that the risk of un-anchoring was reasonably low in both periods, and that long-run inflation expectations were essentially as well anchored in August 2021 as in July 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic.

How economic crises affect inflation beliefs: Evidence from the Covid-19 pandemic.

This paper studies how inflation beliefs reported in the New York Fed's Survey of Consumer Expectations have evolved over the first six months of the Covid-19 pandemic. We find that household inflation expectations responded slowly and mostly at the short-term horizon. In contrast, the data reveal immediate and unprecedented increases in individual inflation uncertainty and in inflation disagreement across respondents. Consistent with precautionary saving, the rise in inflation uncertainty is shown to be associated with how respondents used the stimulus checks they received as part of the 2020 CARES Act. We also find evidence of a strong polarization in inflation beliefs and we identify differences across demographic groups.