Search

The response of US inflation to the high levels of spare capacity during the Great Recession of 2007-09 was rather muted. At the same time, it has been argued that the short-term unemployment gap has a more prominent role in determining inflation, and either the closing of this gap or non-linearities in the Phillips curve could lead to a sudden pick-up in inflation. We revisit these issues by estimating Phillips curves over 1992Q1 to 2015Q1. Our main findings suggest that a Phillips curve model that takes into account inflation persistence, inflation expectations, supply shocks and labour market slack as determinants explains rather well the behaviour of inflation after the Great Recession, with little evidence of a "missing deflation puzzle". More important than the choice of the slack measure is the consideration of time-variation in the slope. In fact, we find that Phillips curve models with time-varying slope coefficients are able to outperform significantly the constant-slope model as well as other non-linear models over 2008Q1-2015Q1.

In the immediate wake of the Great Recession we didn't see the disinflation that most models predicted and, subsequently, we didn't see the inflation they predicted. We show that these puzzles disappear in a Vector Autoregressive model that properly accounts for domestic and global factors. Such a model reveals, among others, that domestic factors explain much of the inflation dynamics in the 2012-2014 euro area missing inflation episode. Consequently, economists and models that excessively focused on the global nature of inflation were liable to miss the contribution of deflationary domestic shocks during this episode.

This paper reviews recent approaches to modeling the labour market and assesses their implications for inflation dynamics through both their effect on marginal cost and on price-setting behaviour. In a search and matching environment, we consider the following modeling setups: right-to-manage bargaining vs. efficient bargaining, wage stickiness in new and existing matches, interactions at the firm level between price and wage-setting, alternative forms of hiring frictions, search on-the-job and endogenous job separation. We find that most specifications imply too little real rigidity and, so, too volatile inflation. Models with wage stickiness and right-to-manage bargaining or with firm-specific labour emerge as the most promising candidates.

An aggregation exercise is proposed that aims at in-vestigating whether the fast average adjustment of the disaggregate inflation series of the euro area CPI translates into the slow adjustment of euro area aggregate inflation. We first estimate a dynamic factor model for 404 inflation sub-indices of the euro area CPI. This allows to decompose the dynamics of inflation sub-indices in two parts: one due to a common "macroeconomic" shock and one due to sector specific "idiosyncratic" shocks. Although "idiosyncratic" shocks dominate the variance of sectoral prices, one common factor, which accounts for 30 per cent of the overall variance of the 404 disaggregate inflation series, is the main driver of aggregate dynamics. In addition, the heterogenous propagation of this common shock across sectoral inflation rates, and in particular its slow propagation to inflation rates of services, generates the persistence of aggregate inflation. We conclude that the aggregation process explains a fair amount of aggregate inflation persistence.

This paper extends the New Keynesian model to allow for stochastic shifts in the monetary policy regime. Agents cannot observe the regime and use a Bayesian learning rule to make optimal inferences. Price setting is adapted to this environment: lagged expectations about monetary policy influence the current inflation rate through an indexation rule. No structural inflation persistence is assumed. We show that this model can capture stylized facts about short-run inflation dynamics both in periods of transition and in stable environments. The role of expectations increases after regime shifts. This creates a link between the degree of inflation persistence and the stability and transparency of monetary policy. Thereby, our model can explain observed changes in inflation persistence.

An important stylized fact to emerge from the VAR estimates is that exogenous monetary policy shocks (also labelled unsystematic monetary policy) have a delayed, persistent, hump shaped effect on inflation. I argue that this empirical pattern is fragile. In particular it disappears when one corrects for the effects of large shifts (breaks) in average inflation or examines periods without such shifts (such as the 1984-2004 period). An important consequence is that the hump shaped VAR estimated response of inflation is not appropriate to fit stylised models of the response of inflation around a stable steady state inflation level.

In this paper we report results on inflation persistence using 79 inflation series covering the EU countries, the euro area and the US for five different inflation variables. The picture that emerges is one of moderate inflation persistence across the board. In particular we find euro area inflation persistence to be broadly in line with US inflation persistence. The issue of allowing for intercept dummies in the underlying inflation models is found to be of paramount importance to avoid overestimation of the level of persistence. The use of alternative measures of persistence is found to be commendable on the grounds that they complement each other in practice.

We apply both classical and Bayesian econometric methods to characterize the dynamic behavior of inflation for twelve industrial countries over the period 1984-2003, using four different price indices for each country. In particular, we estimate a univariate autoregressive (AR) model for each series, and consider the possibility of a structural break at an unknown date. For many of these countries, we find strong evidence for a break in the intercept of the AR equation in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Allowing for a break in intercept, the inflation measures generally exhibit relatively low inflation persistence. Evidently, high inflation persistence is not an inherent characteristic of industrial economies.

Using euro-area data, we re-examine the empirical success of New Keynesian Phillips Curves (NKPCs). The nature of our re-evaluation relies on the actual empirical underpinnings of such estimates: we find existing estimates un-robust and – given that key parameters are generally calibrated rather than estimated – potentially at odds with the data. We re-estimate with a wellspecified optimizing supply-side (which attempts to treat non-stationarity in factor income shares and mark-ups) and this allows us to derive estimates of technology parameters and marginal costs. Our resulting estimates of the euro-area NKPCs are robust, provide reasonable estimates for fixed-price durations and discount rates and embody plausible dynamic properties. Our method for identifying and estimating New Keynesian Phillips curves has general applicability to a wide set of countries and might also be used in identifying sectoral NKPCs.

In this paper we present supporting evidence of the existence of heterogeneity in inflation dynamics across euro area countries. Based on the estimation of New Phillips Curves for five major countries of the euro area, we find that there is significant inertial (backward looking) behavior in inflation in four of them, while inflation in Germany has a dominat forward looking component. We then present an optimizing agent model for the area emphasizing the hetergeneity in inflation persistence across regions. Allowing for such a backward looking component will affect the evaluation of the degree of nominal rigidities relevant for the monetary policy design. We explore the welfare implications of this circumstance by comparing the adjustment of the economies and the area as a whole in response to terms-of-trade shocks under four monetary policy rules: fully optimal, optimal inflation targeting, HICP targeting and output gap stabilization.