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Working Paper
The Inflation Accelerator
We develop a tractable sticky price model in which the fraction of price changesevolves endogenously over time and, consistent with the evidence, increases with inflation. Because we assume that firms sell multiple products and choose how many, but not which, prices to adjust in any given period, our model admits exact aggregation and reduces to a one-equation extension of the Calvo model. This additional equation determines the fraction of price changes. The model features a powerful inflation accelerator – a feedback loop between inflation and the fraction of price changes – which ...
Working Paper
Implications of Inflation Dynamics for Monetary Policy Strategies
This paper considers robust monetary policy strategies both in situations of low demand and low inflation and when economic developments pose a tradeoff between inflation and output stabilization. We proceed in two parts. First, our quantitative analysis suggests that asymmetric average inflation targeting can provide modest benefits over other inflation-targeting strategies when the risks associated with the effective lower bound remain significant. Second, motivated by the recent experience of persistent supply shocks and rapid increases in inflation, we describe the main qualitative ...
Working Paper
Supply Chain Constraints and Inflation
We develop a multisector, open economy, New Keynesian framework to evaluate how potentially binding capacity constraints, and shocks to them, shape inflation. We show that binding constraints for domestic and foreign producers shift domestic and import price Phillips Curves up, similar to reduced-form markup shocks. Further, data on prices and quantities together identify whether constraints bind due to increased demand or reductions in capacity. Applying the model to interpret recent US data, we find that binding constraints explain half of the increase in inflation during 2021-2022. In ...
Working Paper
Nonlinear Inflation Dynamics in Menu Cost Economies
Canonical menu cost models, when parameterized to match the micro-price data, cannot reproduce the extent to which the fraction of price changes increases with inflation. They also predict implausibly large menu costs and misallocation in the presence of strategic complementarities. We resolve these shortcomings by extending the multiproduct menu cost model along two dimensions. First, the products sold by a firm are imperfect substitutes. Second, strategic complementarities are at the firm, not product level. In contrast to standard models, the fraction of price changes increases rapidly ...
Report
Is There a Stable Relationship between Unemployment and Future Inflation?
The empirical literature on the stability of the Phillips curve has largely ignored the bias that endogenous monetary policy imparts on estimated Phillips curve coefficients. We argue that this omission has important implications. When policy is endogenous, estimation based on aggregate data can be uninformative as to the existence of a stable relationship between unemployment and future inflation. But we also argue that regional data can be used to identify the structural relationship between unemployment and inflation. Using city-level and state-level data from 1977 to 2017, we show that ...
Working Paper
The Inflation Accelerator
We develop a tractable sticky price model in which the fraction of price changes evolves endogenously over time and, consistent with the evidence, increases with inflation. Because we assume that firms sell multiple products and choose how many, but not which, prices to adjust in any given period, our model admits exact aggregation and reduces to a one-equation extension of the Calvo model. This additional equation determines the fraction of price changes. The model features a powerful inflation accelerator—a feedback loop between inflation and the fraction of price changes—that ...
Working Paper
Nonlinear Dynamics in Menu Cost Economies? Evidence from U.S. Data
We show that standard menu cost models cannot simultaneously reproduce the dispersion in the size of micro-price changes and the extent to which the fraction of price changes increases with inflation in the U.S. time-series. Though the Golosov and Lucas (2007) model generates fluctuations in the fraction of price changes, it predicts too little dispersion in the size of price changes and therefore little monetary nonneutrality. In contrast, versions of the model that reproduce the dispersion in the size of price changes and generate stronger monetary nonneutrality predict a nearly constant ...
Working Paper
Nonlinear Dynamics in Menu Cost Economies? Evidence from U.S. Data
We show that standard menu cost models cannot simultaneously reproduce the dispersion in the size of micro-price changes and the extent to which the fraction of price changes increases with inflation in the U.S. time-series. Though the Golosov and Lucas (2007) model generates fluctuations in the fraction of price changes, it predicts too little dispersion in the size of price changes and therefore little monetary nonneutrality. In contrast, versions of the model that reproduce the dispersion in the size of price changes and generate stronger monetary non-neutrality predict a nearly constant ...