Political shocks and inflation expectations: Evidence from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine
Dräger, Lena ; Gründler, Klaus ; Potrafke, Niklas
CESifo - Munich
2022
49 p.
inflation ; monetary policy ; economic conditions ; war ; political aspect
CESifo working paper
9649
Financing and monetary policy
English
Bibliogr.
"How do global political shocks influence individuals' expectations about economic outcomes? We run a unique survey on inflation expectations among 145 tenured economics professors in Germany and exploit the 2022 Russian invasion in Ukraine as a natural experiment to identify the effect of a global political shock on expectations about national inflation rates. We find that the Russian invasion increased short-run inflation expectations for 2022 by 0.75 percentage points. Treatment effects are smaller regarding mid-term expectations for 2023 (0.47 percentage points) and are close to zero for longer periods. Text analysis of open questions shows that experts increase their inflation expectations because they expect supply-side effects to become increasingly important after the invasion. Moreover, experts in the treatment group are less likely to favour an immediate reaction of monetary policy to the increased inflation, which gives further evidence of the shock being interpreted primarily as a supply-side shock."
Digital
The ETUI is co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the ETUI.