the great recession and the inflation puzzle notwithstanding high unemployment following the great recession inflation in the united states has been remarkably stable we find that a traditional phillips curve describes the behavior of inflation reasonably well since the 1960s using a non linear kalman filter that allows for time varying parameters we find that three factors have contributed to the observed stability of inflation inflation expectations have become better anchored and to a lower level the slope of the phillips curve has flattened and the importance of import price inflation has increased

the inflation output trade off with downward wage rigidities the macroeconomic implications of downward nominal wage rigidi ties are analyzed via a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model featuring aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks a closed form solution for a long run phillips curve relates average output gap to average wage inflation it is virtually vertical at high inflation and flattens at low inflation macroeconomic volatility shifts the curve outwards and reduces output the results imply that stabilization policies play an important role and that optimal inflation may be positive and dif fer across countries with different macroeconomic volatility results are robust to relaxing the wage constraint for example when large idiosyncratic shocks arise jel e23 e24 e31 e63

inflation dynamics and the output inflation trade off international panel data evidence we explore the impact of inflation and its variability on the output inflation trade off using a unified single step approach in a panel data context a limitation of earlier empirical approaches is that they focus on either cross country or country by country time series analyses this paper employs a dynamic heterogeneous panel data specification and uses an all encompassing estimation framework that accounts for parameter heterogeneity cross sectional dependence dynamics and non stationarity our sample covers 60 countries from 1970 to 2010 while inflation variability reduces the trade off for specific periods and country groups an unambiguous and more pronounced negative relation emerges between the inflation rate and the responsiveness of real output to nominal shocks the findings are in line with the new keynesian view of a negative association between the rate of inflation and the output inflation trade off as well as with the observed flattening of the phillips curve over the past decades

the phillips curve back to the 60s abstract this paper reexamines the behavior of inflation and unemployment and reaches four conclusions 1 the u s phillips curve is alive and well at least as well as in the past 2 inflation expectations however have become steadily more anchored 3 the slope of the curve has substantially declined but the decline dates back to the 1980s rather than to the crisis 4 the standard error of the residual in the relation is large especially in comparison to the low level of inflation each of the four conclusions presents challenges for the conduct of monetary policy

are monetary policy reaction functions asymmetric the role of nonlinearity in the phillips curve abstract this paper investigates the implications of a nonlinear phillips curve for the derivation of optimal monetary policy rules combined with a quadratic loss function the optimal policy is also nonlinear with the policy maker increasing interest rates by a larger amount when inflation or output are above target than the amount it will reduce them when they are below target specifically the main prediction of our model is that such a source of nonlinearity leads to the inclusion of the interaction between expected inflation and the output gap in an otherwise linear taylor rule we find empirical support for this type of asymmetries in the interest rate setting behaviour of four european central banks but none for the us fed

inflation dynamics during the financial crisis using confidential product level price data underlying the u s producer price index ppi this paper analyzes the effect of changes in firms financial conditions on their price setting behavior during the great recession that surrounds the financial crisis the evidence indicates that during the height of the crisis in late 2008 firms with weak balance sheets increased prices significantly relative to industry averages whereas firms with strong balance sheets lowered prices a response consistent with an adverse demand shock these stark differences in price setting behavior are consistent with the notion that financial frictions may significantly influence the response of aggregate inflation to macroeconomic shocks we explore the implications of these empirical findings within a general equilibrium framework that allows for customer markets and departures from the frictionless financial markets in the model firms have an incentive to set a low price to invest in market share though when financial distortions are severe firms forgo these investment opportunities and maintain high prices in an effort to preserve their balance sheet capacity consistent with our empirical findings the model with financial distortions relative to the baseline model without such distortions implies a substantial attenuation of price dynamics in response to contractionary demand shocks

inefficiency and common property regimes abstract much of the literature on the commons focuses on the fact that many agents are assigned usage rights simultaneously but less attention has been paid to the exercise of exclusion rights the simultaneous exercise of one of the two rights by all the owners of a common causes a problem of overexploitation in the first case competition in use and underuse in the second competition in exclusion the relevance of both inefficiencies stems from the way they illustrate the general conflict between individual and collective interests this paper proposes a formal synthesis of the problems of inefficiency associated with the exploitation of resources in common property regimes the synthesis takes into account the following features i the importance of the consumer surplus for the analysis of the issue ii the attitude of economic agents in the face of a reciprocal externality linked to the exploitation of the common and iii the social and the private costs of exploitation

sectoral and aggregate inflation dynamics in the euro area this paper synthesises the implications of recent statistical evidence regarding inflation persistence in the euro area for aggregate data the degree of inflation persistence appears to be very high for sample periods spanning multiple decades but falls dramatically once we allow for time variation in the mean level of inflation furthermore the timing of these breaks in mean generally coincides with observed shifts in the monetary policy regime finally sectoral inflation series exhibit much less persistence than aggregate inflation mainly because of the influence of transitory sector specific shocks jel e31 c22 c43

price stickiness trend inflation and output dynamics a cross country analysis the sticky price model of aggregate fluctuations implies that countries with high trend inflation rates should exhibit less persistent output fluctuations than countries with low trend inflation

international evidence on the new keynesian phillips curve using aggregate and disaggregate data we present a unique empirical analysis of the properties of the new keynesian phillips curve nkpc using an international data set of aggregate and disaggregate sectoral inflation our results from panel time series estimation clearly indicate that sectoral heterogeneity has important consequences for aggregate inflation behavior heterogeneity helps to explain the overestimation of inflation persistence and underestimation of the role of marginal costs in empirical investigations of the nkpc that use aggregate data we find that combining disaggregate information with heterogeneous consistent estimation techniques helps to reconcile to a large extent the nkpc with the data

modeling inflation dynamics a critical review of recent research in recent years a broad academic consensus has arisen around the use of rational expectations sticky price models to capture inflation dynamics these models are seen as providing an empirically reasonable characterization of observed inflation behavior once suitable measures of the output gap are chosen and moreover are perceived to be robust to the lucas critique in a way that earlier econometric models of inflation are not we review the principal conclusions of this literature concerning 1 the ability of these models to fit the data 2 the importance of rational forward looking expectations in price setting and 3 the appropriate measure of inflationary pressures we argue that existing rational expectations sticky price models fail to provide a useful empirical description of the inflation process especially relative to traditional econometric phillips curves of the sort commonly employed for policy analysis

the history of the phillips curve consensus and bifurcation while the early history of the phillips curve up to 1975 is well known less well understood is the post 1975 fork in the road the left fork developed a theory of policy responses to supply shocks in the context of price stickiness in the non shocked sector its econometric implementation interacts shocks with backward looking inertia the right fork approach emphasizes forward looking expectations that can jump in response to anticipated policy changes the left fork approach is better suited to explaining the postwar us inflation process while the right fork approach is essential for understanding behaviour in economies with unstable macroeconomic environments the history of the phillips curve pc has evolved in two phases before and after 1975 with a widespread consensus about the pre 1975 evolution which is well understood bifurcation begins in 1975 when the pc literature split down two forks of the road with little communication or interaction between the two forks the major contribution of this paper and hence the source of bifurcation in its subtitle is to examine contrast and test the contributions of the two post 1975 forks the pre 1975 history is straightforward and is covered in section i the initial discovery of the negative inflation unemployment relation by phillips popularized by samuelson and solow was followed by a brief period in which policy makers assumed that they could exploit the trade off to reduce unemployment at a small cost of additional inflation then the natural rate revolution of friedman phelps and lucas overturned the policy exploitable trade off in favour of long run monetary neutrality those who had implemented the econometric version of the trade off pc in the 1960s reeled in disbelief when sargent demonstrated the logical failure of their test of neutrality and finally were condemned to the wreckage of keynesian economics by lucas and sargent following the twist of the inflation unemployment correlation from negative in the 1960s to positive in the 1970s the architects of neutrality and the opponents of the keynesian trade off emerged triumphant with two major caveats that their own models based on information barriers were unconvincing and that their core result that business cycles were driven by monetary or price surprises floundered without supporting evidence after 1975 the evolution of the pc literature split in two directions each of which has largely failed to recognize the other s contributions section ii reviews the left fork of the road the revival of the pc trade off in a coherent and integrated dynamic aggregate supply and demand framework that emerged in the late 1970s in econometric tests in theoretical contributions and in intermediate macro textbooks this approach which i have called mainstream is resolutely keynesian because the inflation rate is dominated by persistence and inertia in the form of long lags on past inflation an important difference between the mainstream approach and other post 1975 developments is that the role of past inflation is not limited to the formation of expectations but also includes a pure persistence effect due to fixed duration wage and price contracts and lags between

what makes the output inflation trade off change the absence of accelerating deflation in japan it is standard to model the output inflation trade off as a linear relationship with a time invariant slope we assess empirical evidence for two sets of theories that allow for endogenous variation in the slope of the short run phillips curve at an empirical level we examine why large negative output gaps in japan in the late 1990s did not lead to accelerating deflation but instead coincided with stable albeit moderately negative inflation our results suggest that this episode is most convincingly interpreted as reflecting a gradual flattening of the phillips curve we find that this flattening is best explained by models with endogenous price durations these models imply that in any economy where trend inflation is substantially lower or substantially higher today than in past decades time variation in the slope of the phillips curve has become too important to ignore

the political economy of direct legislation direct democracy and local decision making local fiscal referenda the dampening effect on taxes and spending local and regional governments account for an important share of total government spending and given the decentralization trend in oecd nations this is likely to increase how should this spending be governed this article argues that direct democracy is best suited to organize decision making at the state and local level to support this we present the main theoretical arguments on why and how referenda and initiatives affect fiscal policy outcomes the basic argument concerns voter control under representative democracy citizens only have direct control at election time with referenda and initiatives citizens can selectively control their representatives on specific policies whenever they deviate sufficiently from citizens preferences as a result fiscal policy outcomes are likely to more closely reflect voter preferences we empirically test this on swiss data since switzerland provides a natural laboratory for local governance the governance structures of swiss cantons and localities with respect to fiscal issues range from classic parliamentary democracy to pure direct democracy and an important part of spending and taxation is controlled at these levels specifically we estimate an econometric model of fiscal behaviour using data from 1986 to 1997 for the 26 swiss cantons and 1990 data on 134 local communities it is shown that mandatory referenda on fiscal issues at both levels have a dampening effect on expenditure and revenue and at the local level also on public debt combining this with existing empirical evidence leads to a relatively uncontested result namely that elements of direct democracy are associated with sounder public finances better economic performance and higher satisfaction of citizens lars p feld and gebhard kirchgassner

some international evidence on the lucas supply function abstract we provide empirical evidence on the lucas supply function based on actual inflation surprises for 19 industrial economies our results show that the inflation surprise positively correlates with the output gap and that this relationship is negatively related to inflation variability

the lucas hypothesis on the phillips curve further international evidence abstract this paper is a further attempt to test the lucas hypothesis on the phillips curve by making cross country comparisons that hypothesis posits that nominal shocks affect real aggregates only if individuals mistake them for what they are not movements in real variables the existence of a trade off between output and inflation is conditional on economic agents misinterpreting the price movements they observe countries with widely fluctuating exogenous shocks will have a more vertical phillips curve as their inhabitants sharpen their instrumental to differentiate between real and nominal shocks hence cross country comparisons provide fertile grounds to test this hypothesis if it holds true we should find a positive correlation between phillips curve slopes and the standard deviations of the exogenous shocks the evidence presented here confirms lucas s findings

sectoral phillips curves and the aggregate phillips curve sector level phillips curves are estimated in french data there is considerable heterogeneity across sectors with vastly different estimates of the backward looking component of inflation and the duration of nominal rigidities a multi sector model of inflation dynamics is calibrated on the basis of these sectoral estimates aggregate inflation simulated on the basis of heterogeneous sectors displays comparable dynamics to actual data a comparison is drawn between the policy trade offs implied by a phillips curve based on macroeconomic estimates vs one based on a model with heterogeneous sectors the difference is sizeable

intracountry evidence on the lucas variance hypothesis intracountry evidence on the lucas variance hypothesis i introduction seventeen years ago lucas 1973 developed an aggregate supply model that challenged the efficacy of neo keynesian macroeconomic stabilization policy and significantly altered the development of macroeconomic models employing a multimarket stochastic equilibrium model lucas assumed that individual suppliers decide how much to produce based on perceived relative prices their expectations of future prices and demand are formed rationally using all available information about specific and economy wide prices and quantities changes in market specific prices however reflect both changes in the general price level and changes in relative prices individual suppliers cannot distinguish between the two because they have instantaneous information about their own specific prices but only lagged information about the general price level thus a current unanticipated increase in the general price level and nominal aggregate demand will be partly perceived by suppliers as an increase in the relative price and relative demand for their goods and they will temporarily increase output a highly volatile general price level and nominal aggregate demand result in less general relative price confusion and a fading of the short run output inflation tradeoff that is the lucas model suggests an inverse relationship between the output inflation tradeoff and the variability of the rate of inflation and the rate of change of nominal aggregate demand lucas used a sample of eighteen countries to see whether the terms of the output inflation tradeoff vary across countries in the way predicted by the natural rate theory 1973 330 he estimated the following reduced form supply function over the 1952 67 period y sub ct pi delta pi delta chi sub t lambda y sub c t 1 1 where y sub ct is detrended real gnp delta chi sub t is the change of the natural logarithm of nominal gnp delta is the average rate of demand expansion lambda is the speed of adjustment with lambda less than to 1 and pi is the response of real gnp to changes in nominal gnp with 0 is not less than or equal to pi is not less than or equal to 1 since the estimated tradeoff coefficients were found to be greater for a group of sixteen stable countries than for two highly volatile countries lucas argued that the behavior of the estimated pi values across countries is in striking conformity with the natural rate hypothesis 1973 332 empirical studies by albero 1981 attfield and duck 1983 fernadez 1977 hanson 1980 hercowitz 1983 and koskela and viren 1980 have generally provided cross country evidence supporting luca s variance hypothesis froyen and waud 1980 however presented in addition to cross country evidence limited intracountry evidence for 1 the relationship between the output inflation tradeoff and the variances of the rate of change of nominal income and the price level and 2 the relationship between the variance of the inflation rate and the variance of the rate of change of nominal income they examined these relationships on a cross country basis for each of ten industrialized countries for the 1956 76 period the 1957 66 and 1967 76 subperiods were used to make intracountry comparisons in individual countries their cross country and intracountry results support the hypothesis that the output inflation tradeoff and the variance of the inflation rate are inversely related their evidence however does not suggest that the variance of the rate of change of nominal income is negatively correlated with the tradeoff and positively correlated with the variance of the inflation rate 1 it is assumed in luca s paper and all other cross country studies that the slope of the supply curve gamma and the variance of the specific market price from its economy wide average tau

international evidence on a new keynesian theory of the output inflation trade off this article provides empirical evidence on the validity of a new keynesian theory of the output inflation tradeoff the theory offered by laurence ball n gregory mankiw and david romer 1988 synthesizes recent work on menu costs and imperfect competition used to ground keynesian theory in maximizing behavior the present paper focuses on a key prediction namely that higher average inflation makes output less sensitive to nominal shocks that proposition is tested using data for each of forty three countries importantly average inflation is found to have the predicted effect in a significant fraction of those countries an outcome which supports the new keynesian view copyright 1991 by ohio state university press

phillips curve instability and optimal monetary policy this paper assesses the implications for optimal discretionary monetary policy if the slope of the phillips curve changes the paper first derives a phillips curve from the optimal pricing decision of a monopolistic firm that faces a changing cost of price adjustment the second aspect of the paper constructs a utility based welfare criterion a novel feature of this criterion is that is has a relative weight on output gap deviations that changes synchronously with changes in the cost of price adjustment the systematic component of the targeting rule that implements the optimal discretionary policy under the utility based criteria is constant in contrast the systematic component of the targeting rule under an ad hoc criteria changes along with changes in the slope of the phillips curve

an updated assessment of the lucas supply curve and the inflation output trade off abstract previous work assessing the results of lucas lucas r 1972 expectations and the neutrality of money journal of economic theory 4 103 124 and the inflation output trade off is updated by incorporating recent data avoiding spurious regressions and bootstrapping results the relationship hypothesized by lucas is reinforced but mean inflation results are inconclusive

inflation persistence monetary policy and the great moderation there is growing evidence that the empirical phillips curve within the united states has changed significantly since the early 1980s in particular inflation persistence has declined sharply this paper demonstrates that this decline is consistent with a standard dynamic new keynesian dnk model in which i the variability of technology shocks has declined and ii the central bank more aggressively responds to inflation

the time varying phillips correlation we use complex demodulation techniques to investigate changes in the correlation between real activity and inflation at the business cycle frequencies in the united states the united kingdom the eurozone and 10 other organization for economic cooperation and development oecd countries over the post wwii era consistent with the analysis of ball mankiw and romer 1988 we document a positive correlation between the time varying average gain of real activity onto inflation at the business cycle frequencies and inflation s hodrick prescott trend which is compatible with new keynesian theories emphasizing the link between trend inflation the frequency of price adjustments and the slope of the phillips trade off