Central Bank of Russia publishes first 2026 issue of the Russian Journal of Money and Finance covering firm price revisions, inflation expectations and housing price gaps

The Central Bank of Russia released the first 2026 issue of the quarterly Russian Journal of Money and Finance, featuring research on the drivers of Russian firms’ price changes, the formation of inflation expectations and how narratives shape them, and differences between prices in primary and secondary housing markets. Using the Bank of Russia’s business monitoring data, Marya Nema and co-authors find firms’ price responses to factors such as inflation, exchange rates and business cycle conditions are asymmetric, with price increases during periods of stronger business activity more pronounced than price decreases when activity weakens. Dmitry Novikov (European University at St Petersburg) analyses consumer inflation expectations in Russia and the United States and links deviations from rational expectations to the diagnostic expectations hypothesis, under which people overweight recent events. An experiment by Elizaveta Zvezdina (Lomonosov Moscow State University) indicates many participants interpret a key rate increase as a cost factor that raises inflation, while an explanatory narrative about the key rate’s impact on inflation reduces inflation expectations. On housing, Ianina Roshchina (Lomonosov Moscow State University) and Anna Litvinova (Yandex.Technologies LLC) propose a methodology that controls for housing characteristics and finds a zero price gap between new and existing housing in most regions, with some regions showing lower prices for new builds. All articles from the issue are available on the journal’s website.