A new approach to assess inflation expectations anchoring using strategic surveys

•We propose a new approach to assess the anchoring of inflation expectations using “strategic surveys.” Namely, we measure households’ revisions in long-run inflation expectations after they are presented with different economic scenarios.•A key advantage of this approach is that it provides a causal interpretation in terms of how inflation events affect long-run inflation expectations.•We implement the method in the summer of 2019 and the spring-summer of 2021 when the anchoring of long-run inflation expectations was in question.•We find that the risk of un-anchoring of expectations 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.