Assessment of inflation expectations based on internet data

This article provides assessments of inflation expectations of Russian internet users based on the posts of the social media Vkontakte and Google Trends search queries during 2014–2021. We collect posts from news communities and search queries to measure inflation expectations using inflation‐related regular expressions. Inflation expectations based on internet data are highly correlated with actual inflation and reflect household concerns about price increases during 2014–2021. Granger causality tests have shown both measures of internet user inflation expectations can be potential predictors of actual inflation. An econometric analysis of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve is carried out using VAR from February 2015 to December 2021. The results suggest that an increase in inflation expectations is consistent with an increase in actual inflation and a tightening of monetary policy.