Inflation expectations proprieties during the war: The case of Ukraine

This study compares consumer and professional inflation expectations in Ukraine before and during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We apply entropy-based measures to tackle co-movements of expectations and macro variables (inflation, food inflation, exchange rate and production) and dynamic time warping to assess their forward and backward orientation. The pre-war sample spans from May 2019 to February 2022, and the war sample from March 2022 to December 2024. We expected to find differences between pre-war and wartime samples, as war constitutes a political shock with severe economic consequences. The study confirms the change of expectations: more substantial mutual information with past inflation in most cases, better alignment between professionals and consumers, and a change in the distances between expectations and past or future inflation. This is the first empirical study discussing Ukrainian economic agents’ expectations during the full-scale invasion. Its novel aspect also concerns the method applied—standard procedures cannot be used for this sample length.