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Working Paper
Global Inflation, Regional Factors
This paper shows that global inflation dynamics have a sizable regional component. Using a balanced panel of 61 countries that starts in 1970, we document that while the global factor, defined as the dominant principal component, explains a large portion of inflation variation in advanced economies, a model with only one principal component is less successful for developing countries. By contrast, a hierarchical dynamic factor model, which includes a global (unconstrained) factor and regional (restricted) factors, performs substantially better for emerging market and developing economies. The ...
Working Paper
Inflation Factors
This paper develops an econometric framework for identifying latent factors that provide real time estimates of supply and demand conditions shaping goods- and services-related price pressures in the U.S. economy. The factors are estimated using category-specific personal consumption expenditures (PCE) data on prices and quantities, using a sign-restricted dynamic factor model that imposes theoretical predictions of the effects of fluctuations in supply and demand on prices and associated quantities through factor loadings. The resulting estimates are used to decompose total PCE inflation ...
Working Paper
Output Spillovers from U.S. Monetary Policy: The Role of International Trade and Financial Linkages
We estimate that U.S. monetary policy has sizable spillover effects on global economic activity. In response to a surprise increase in the federal funds rate of 25 basis points, real output in our sample of 44 countries declines on average by 0.9% after three years. We find that international trade is a more important factor than international finance in explaining these spillovers. In particular, countries with a high share of exports and imports in output have 79% larger responses than countries with a low share, whereas we do not find significant heterogeneity depending on a country’s ...
Report
The Historical Effects of Banking Distress on Economic Activity
The failures of several U.S. regional banks have stimulated discussions about the macroeconomic effects of a likely credit contraction triggered by the recent banking turmoil. Drawing on historical evidence from advanced economies, this study documents a sizable and persistent decline in output and rise in unemployment following non-systemic financial distress. The effects of a systemic banking crisis are two to four times as large. High corporate leverage exacerbates banking turmoil, whereas high bank capitalization and a relatively large share of market financing in corporate debt mitigate ...
Working Paper
The Aggregate Effects of Sectoral Shocks in an Open Economy
We study the aggregate effects of sectoral productivity shocks in a multisectoral New Keynesian open-economy model that allows for asymmetric input-output linkages, both within and between countries, as well as for heterogeneity in sectoral Calvo-type price stickiness. Asymmetries in the international production network play a key role in the model’s ability to produce large domestic effects of foreign sectoral supply shocks and large differential effects of domestic shocks and global shocks. Larger trade openness and substitutability between domestic inputs and foreign inputs can also ...
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Parsing Out the Sources of Inflation
The authors have developed a statistical model that breaks down total Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) inflation into underlying supply and demand factors, enabling quantification of those sources of price pressures as they arise.
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The Distribution of Sectoral Price Changes and Recent Inflation Developments
Inflation has declined across many sectors so far in 2023, but the distribution of sectoral price changes still shows atypical features, such as bimodality in which substantial masses of sectors record price changes both below and above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent inflation target. Such bimodality was not typical before the pandemic, suggesting that sector-specific price adjustments are now playing a more important role in inflation developments. The recent slowdown in inflation was partly caused by a larger-than-normal share of the consumption basket being located in the left tail of ...
Report
Sectoral inflation and the Phillips curve: what has changed since the Great Recession?
Using sectoral data at a medium level of aggregation, we find that price changes became less responsive to aggregate unemployment around 2009?2010. The slopes of the disaggregated Phillips curves diminished in many sectors, including housing and some services. We also document a decrease in sectoral inflation persistence, suggesting an increase in the weight of the forward-looking inflation expectation component and a decrease in the weight of the backward-looking component.
Working Paper
Do Multisectoral New Keynesian Models Match Sectoral Data?
We document empirical regularities of disaggregated inflation and consumption and study whether multisectoral New Keynesian models can explain them. We focus on higher moments of the inflation and consumption growth distributions as well as on the contemporaneous comovement of these two variables. We find that the sectoral distributions of inflation and consumption growth are asymmetric, with inflation skewed negatively and consumption growth positively. Both distributions are highly leptokurtic. In the full sample, from the mid-1980s through 2021, sectoral inflation and consumption growth ...
Report
Are the Demand and Supply Channels of Inflation Persistent? Evidence from a Novel Decomposition of PCE Inflation
Using highly disaggregated personal consumption expenditures data, I analyze whether the recent inflation run-up is explained by supply shocks more than by demand shocks, and whether these demand and supply shocks are likely persistent or transitory. I develop a new decomposition method that enables me to classify inflation in disaggregated consumption categories as being driven predominantly by persistent supply shocks, transitory supply shocks, transitory demand shocks, or persistent demand shocks. Similar to other recent analyses, this brief finds that both demand and supply shocks are ...