A New Approach to Assess Inflation Expectations Anchoring Using Strategic Surveys

ABSTRACT

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.