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The Recent Steepening of Phillips Curves
The Phillips curve captures the empirical inverse relationship between the level of inflation and unemployment. The reciprocal of its slope, sometimes referred to as the “sacrifice ratio,” represents the increase in the unemployment rate associated with a 1 percentage point reduction in the inflation rate. In this Chicago Fed Letter, we provide evidence that the Phillips curve has steepened in many industrialized countries since the start of the recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. This suggests a lower sacrifice ratio now than before 2020.
Newsletter
The Evolution of Disagreement About Long-Run Inflation, 2007–24
In this article, we examine disagreement about long-run U.S. inflation in two closely watched surveys over the period 2007–24.1 This was a tumultuous period. The economy was hit by two very large shocks: the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2007–08 and the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020–21. Unemployment soared from 5% to 10% over the 2008–09 period and took six years to reach pre-crisis levels. In March 2020, unemployment surged to 10% from historically low levels, but it returned to pre-pandemic levels in the second half of 2021. Inflation ran below 2% from early 2008 until early 2021, ...
Working Paper
Playing with Money
Experimental studies in monetary economics usually study infinite horizon models. Yet, the time constraints of the laboratory sessions in which these models are conducted create finite horizons that imply monetary equilibria cannot exist. Moreover, laboratory subjects do not treat the probabilistic termination rule typically used in a manner consistent with the discount factor that the rule is intended to replace. Thus, it is unclear whether these experiments evaluate subjects' use of money to ameliorate trading frictions as an equilibrium phenomenon, their inability to understand backward ...