Olivier Armantier’s et al. article, “How Economic Crises Affect Inflation Beliefs: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic,” was published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization on July 24, 2021. Publisher Elsevier has partnered with the Copyright Center RightsLink service to offer various options for reusing this content. Elsevier offers open or restricted access to content with permanently unique identifiers to include links and citations. This paper is an independent article focusing on the state of the public economy during COVID-19.
In their paper, the authors examine changes in the perception of inflation during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although this paper is an independent work, Armantier et al. (2021) complemented other research in the field analyzing economic changes during the COVID-19 recession. A feature of the article is the study by the authors of the consequences of inflationary crises and comparison with pre-existing crises to calculate the level of the crisis as a whole. The survey’s main purpose is to collect against a wide range of economic outcomes.
As a result of their research, the authors studied the evolution of households’ perceptions of inflation and concluded that the growth of inflationary expectations was more restrained. It means that the muted reaction of average inflation expectations masks a significant polarization of views, especially in the short term (Bekaert et al., 2020). A significant proportion of households, particularly those with higher education, initially expected that the pandemic would lead to low inflation or even deflation (Armantier et al., 2021). Thus, the authors achieved their goal and confirmed their results with numerous graphs and tables presented in the article.
I liked the study by Armantier et al. (2021) because the authors look at non-traditionally triggered crises and household responses. In addition, through comparative analysis with past crises, Armantier et al. (2021) determine the spread of the crisis due to erroneous assumptions about inflation to other areas of the economy (Armantier et al., 2021). For example, the Great Recession was predominantly a strong negative demand shock driven by a falling house and stock prices. I also liked that the authors found evidence for strong polarization of inflation perceptions and identified differences between demographic groups.