Learning-through-Survey in Inflation Expectations?

When surveys rely on repeat participants, this raises the possibil-ity that survey participation may affect future responses, perhaps by prompting information acquisition between survey waves. We show that these " learning-through-survey" effects are large for household inflation expectations. Repeat survey participants gener-ally have lower inflation expectations and uncertainty, particularly if their initial uncertainty was high. Consequently, repeat partici-pants may be more informed about or attentive to inflation. This has important implications: for example, inflation expectations of new participants are more influenced by oil prices, and estimates of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution are lower for new participants. (JEL C83, D84, E31, E37, E58)