Download Free Inflation Dynamics And The Role Of Inflation Expectation Formation Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Inflation Dynamics And The Role Of Inflation Expectation Formation and write the review.

Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.
Understanding the sources of inflation persistence is crucial for monetary policy. This paper provides an empirical assessment of the influence of inflation expectations' anchoring on the persistence of inflation. We construct a novel index of inflation expectations' anchoring using survey-based inflation forecasts for 45 economies starting in 1989. We then study the response of consumer prices to terms-of-trade shocks for countries with flexible exchange rates. We find that these shocks have a significant and persistent effect on consumer price inflation when expectations are poorly anchored. By contrast, inflation reacts by less and returns quickly to its pre-shock level when expectations are strongly anchored.
Current perspectives on the Phillips curve, a core macroeconomic concept that treats the relationship between inflation and unemployment. In 1958, economist A. W. Phillips published an article describing what he observed to be the inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment; subsequently, the “Phillips curve” became a central concept in macroeconomic analysis and policymaking. But today's Phillips curve is not the same as the original one from fifty years ago; the economy, our understanding of price setting behavior, the determinants of inflation, and the role of monetary policy have evolved significantly since then. In this book, some of the top economists working today reexamine the theoretical and empirical validity of the Phillips curve in its more recent specifications. The contributors consider such questions as what economists have learned about price and wage setting and inflation expectations that would improve the way we use and formulate the Phillips curve, what the Phillips curve approach can teach us about inflation dynamics, and how these lessons can be applied to improving the conduct of monetary policy. Contributors Lawrence Ball, Ben Bernanke, Oliver Blanchard, V. V. Chari, William T. Dickens, Stanley Fischer, Jeff Fuhrer, Jordi Gali, Michael T. Kiley, Robert G. King, Donald L. Kohn, Yolanda K. Kodrzycki, Jane Sneddon Little, Bartisz Mackowiak, N. Gregory Mankiw, Virgiliu Midrigan, Giovanni P. Olivei, Athanasios Orphanides, Adrian R. Pagan, Christopher A. Pissarides, Lucrezia Reichlin, Paul A. Samuelson, Christopher A. Sims, Frank R. Smets, Robert M. Solow, Jürgen Stark, James H. Stock, Lars E. O. Svensson, John B. Taylor, Mark W. Watson
The NBER Macroeconomics Annual presents pioneering work in macroeconomics by leading academic researchers to an audience of public policymakers and the academic community. Each commissioned paper is followed by comments and discussion. This year's edition provides a mix of cutting-edge research and policy analysis on such topics as productivity and information technology, the increase in wealth inequality, behavioral economics, and inflation.
"The notion that expectations play a key role in economic decision making is a very old one. Over the past 100 years, major advances in the application of this insight in the formulation of economic models have been made in various subfields of economics. The concept of extrapolation, the idea that past observations of a series are the basis for making projections into the future, was present from the start of the modeling of dynamic economic processes"--
Over the past fifteen years, a significant number of industrialized and middle-income countries have adopted inflation targeting as a framework for monetary policymaking. As the name suggests, in such inflation-targeting regimes, the central bank is responsible for achieving a publicly announced target for the inflation rate. While the objective of controlling inflation enjoys wide support among both academic experts and policymakers, and while the countries that have followed this model have generally experienced good macroeconomic outcomes, many important questions about inflation targeting remain. In Inflation Targeting, a distinguished group of contributors explores the many underexamined dimensions of inflation targeting—its potential, its successes, and its limitations—from both a theoretical and an empirical standpoint, and for both developed and emerging economies. The volume opens with a discussion of the optimal formulation of inflation-targeting policy and continues with a debate about the desirability of such a model for the United States. The concluding chapters discuss the special problems of inflation targeting in emerging markets, including the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary.
This is the first comprehensive study in the context of EMDEs that covers, in one consistent framework, the evolution and global and domestic drivers of inflation, the role of expectations, exchange rate pass-through and policy implications. In addition, the report analyzes inflation and monetary policy related challenges in LICs. The report documents three major findings: In First, EMDE disinflation over the past four decades was to a significant degree a result of favorable external developments, pointing to the risk of rising EMDE inflation if global inflation were to increase. In particular, the decline in EMDE inflation has been supported by broad-based global disinflation amid rapid international trade and financial integration and the disruption caused by the global financial crisis. While domestic factors continue to be the main drivers of short-term movements in EMDE inflation, the role of global factors has risen by one-half between the 1970s and the 2000s. On average, global shocks, especially oil price swings and global demand shocks have accounted for more than one-quarter of domestic inflation variatio--and more in countries with stronger global linkages and greater reliance on commodity imports. In LICs, global food and energy price shocks accounted for another 12 percent of core inflation variatio--half more than in advanced economies and one-fifth more than in non-LIC EMDEs. Second, inflation expectations continue to be less well-anchored in EMDEs than in advanced economies, although a move to inflation targeting and better fiscal frameworks has helped strengthen monetary policy credibility. Lower monetary policy credibility and exchange rate flexibility have also been associated with higher pass-through of exchange rate shocks into domestic inflation in the event of global shocks, which have accounted for half of EMDE exchange rate variation. Third, in part because of poorly anchored inflation expectations, the transmission of global commodity price shocks to domestic LIC inflation (combined with unintended consequences of other government policies) can have material implications for poverty: the global food price spikes in 2010-11 tipped roughly 8 million people into poverty.
Do euro area inflation expectations remain well-anchored? This paper finds that the protracted period of low (and below-target) inflation in the euro area since 2013 has weakened their anchoring. Testing their sensitivity to inflation and macroeconomic news, this paper expands existing results in two key dimensions. First, by analyzing all available (advanced) inflation releases. Second, the reactions of expectations are investigated at daily, time-varying and intraday frequency regressions to add robustness to our conclusions. Results point to a significant impact of inflation news over recent years that had not been observed before in the euro area.
This paper examines inflation dynamics in the United States since 1960, with a particular focus on the Great Recession. A puzzle emerges when Phillips curves estimated over 1960-2007 are ussed to predice inflation over 2008-2010: inflation should have fallen by more than it did. We resolve this puzzle with two modifications of the Phillips curve, both suggested by theories of costly price adjustment: we measure core inflation with the median CPI inflation rate, and we allow the slope of the Phillips curve to change with the level and vairance of inflation. We then examine the hypothesis of anchored inflation expectations. We find that expectations have been fully "shock-anchored" since the 1980s, while "level anchoring" has been gradual and partial, but significant. It is not clear whether expectations are sufficiently anchored to prevent deflation over the next few years. Finally, we show that the Great Recession provides fresh evidence against the New Keynesian Phillips curve with rational expectations.
This paper examines the recent behavior of core inflation in the United States. We specify a simple Phillips curve based on the assumptions that inflation expectations are fully anchored at the Federal Reserve’s target, and that labor-market slack is captured by the level of shortterm unemployment. This equation explains inflation behavior since 2000, including the failure of high total unemployment since 2008 to reduce inflation greatly. The fit of our equation is especially good when we measure core inflation with the Cleveland Fed’s series on weighted median inflation. We also propose a more general Phillips curve in which core inflation depends on short-term unemployment and on expected inflation as measured by the Survey of Professional Forecasters. This specification fits U.S. inflation since 1985, including both the anchored-expectations period of the 2000s and the preceding period when expectations were determined by past levels of inflation.