Search Results
Working Paper
New tests of the New-Keynesian Phillips curve
Is the observed correlation between current and lagged inflation a function of backward-looking inflation expectations, or do the lags in inflation regressions merely proxy for rational forward-looking expectations, as in the new-Keynesian Phillips curve? Recent research has attempted to answer this question by using instrumental variables techniques to estimate "hybrid" specifications for inflation that allow for effects of lagged and future inflation. We show that these tests of forward-looking behavior have very low power against alternative, but non-nested, backward-looking ...
Working Paper
Explaining the investment boom of the 1990s
Real equipment investment in the United States has boomed in recent years, led by soaring investment in computers. We find that traditional aggregate econometric models completely fail to capture the magnitude of this recent growth--mainly because these models neglect to address two features that are crucial (and unique) to the current investment boom. First, the pace at which firms replace depreciated capital has increased. Second, investment has been more sensitive to the cost of capital. We document that these two features stem from the special behavior of investment in computers and ...
Working Paper
Wage curve vs. Phillips curve: are there macroeconomic implications?
The standard derivation of the accelerationist Phillips curve relates expected real wage inflation to the unemployment rate and invokes a constant price markup and adaptive expectations to generate the accelerationist price inflation formula. Blanchflower and Oswald (1994) argue that microeconomic evidence of a low autoregression coefficient in real wage regressions invalidates the macroeconomic Phillips curve. This conclusion has been disputed by a number of authors on the grounds that the true autoregression coefficient is close to 1. This paper shows that given the assumption of a constant ...
Working Paper
Tax incentives, material inputs, and the supply curve for capital equipment
The slope of the supply curve for capital equipment has important implications for the macroeconomics of investment and the effects of tax reform on capital accumulation. Goolsbee (1998) has used changes in investment tax incentives to identify whether this supply curve is significantly upward-sloping and has concluded that it is. This paper shows that investment tax incentives are a poor instrument for identifying this supply curve because they are spuriously correlated with supply shocks for equipment producers. Once input costs for equipment producers are controlled for, there is no ...
Working Paper
Does the labor share of income drive inflation?
Woodford (2001) has presented evidence that the new-Keynesian Phillips curve fits the empirical behavior of inflation well when the labor income share is used as a driving variable, but fits poorly when deterministically detrended output is used. He concludes that the output gap--the deviation between actual and potential output--is better captured by the labor income share, in turn implying that central banks should raise interest rates in response to increases in the labor share. We show that the empirical evidence generally suggests that the labor share version of the new-Keynesian ...
Conference Paper
Should monetary policy target labor's share of income?
In recent work, Woodford (2001) presents evidence that using real unit labor costs (labor's share of income) as a driving variable in the new-Keynesian Phillips curve yields a superior fit for inflation relative to a model that uses deterministically detrended real GDP. This evidence leads him to conclude that the output gap the deviation between actual and potential output is better captured by the labor income share, in turn implying that the monetary authority should raise interest rates in response to increases in this variable. We document that the empirical case for the superiority of ...
Working Paper
A note on the cointegration of consumption, income, and wealth
Lettau and Ludvigson (2001) argue that a log-linearized approximation to an aggregate budget constraint predicts that log consumption, assets, and labor income will be cointegrated. They conclude that this cointegrating relationship is present in U.S. data, and that the estimated cointegrating residual forecasts future asset growth. This note examines whether the cointegrating relationship suggested by Lettau and Ludvigson's theoretical framework actually exists. We demonstrate that we cannot reject the hypothesis that cointegration is absent from the data once we employ measures of ...
Working Paper
Can rational expectations sticky-price models explain inflation dynamics?
The canonical inflation specification in sticky-price rational expectations models (the new-Keynesian Phillips curve) is often criticized on the grounds that it fails to account for the dependence of inflation on its own lags. In response, many recent studies have employed a "hybrid" sticky-price specification in which inflation depends on a weighted average of lagged and expected future values of itself, in addition to a driving variable such as the output gap. In this paper, we consider some simple tests of the hybrid model that are derived from the model's closed-form solution. Our ...
Working Paper
On the relationships between real consumption, income and wealth
The existence of durable goods implies that the welfare flow from consumption cannot be directly associated with total consumption expenditures. As a result, tests of standard theories of consumption (such as the Permanent Income Hypothesis, or PIH) typically focus on nondurable goods and services. Specifically, these studies generally relate real consumption of nondurable goods and services to measures of real income and wealth, where the latter are deflated by a price index for total consumption expenditures. We demonstrate that this procedure is only valid under the assumption that real ...
Working Paper
Real wage dynamics and the Phillips curve
Since Friedman (1968), the traditional derivation of the accelerationist Phillips curve has related expected real wage inflation to the unemployment rate and then invoked markup pricing and adaptive expectations to generate the accelerationist price inflation equation. Blanchflower and Oswald (1994) have argued that microeconomic evidence of a low autoregression coefficient in real wage regressions invalidates this approach, a conclusion that has been disputed widely on the grounds that the true autoregression coefficient is close to one. This paper shows that the accelerationist relationship ...