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Working Paper
Fast micro and slow macro: can aggregation explain the persistence of inflation?
An aggregation exercise is proposed that aims at investigating whether the fast average adjustment of the disaggregate inflation series of the euro area CPI translates into the slow adjustment of euro area aggregate inflation. We first estimate a dynamic factor model for 404 inflation sub-indices of the euro area CPI. This allows to decompose the dynamics of inflation sub-indices in two parts: one due to a common
Working Paper
Monetary policy, output composition and the Great Moderation
This paper shows how US monetary policy contributed to the drop in the volatility of US output fluctuations and to the decoupling of household investment from the business cycle. I estimate a model of household investment, an aggregate of non durable consumption and corporate sector investment, inflation and a short-term interest rate. Subsets of the models' parameters can vary along independent Markov Switching processes. ; A specific form of switches in the monetary policy regimes, i.e. changes in the size of monetary policy shocks, affect both the correlation between output components and ...
Working Paper
The pre-Great Recession slowdown in productivity
In the years since the Great Recession, many observers have highlighted the slow pace of productivity growth around the world. For the United States and Europe, we highlight that this slow pace began prior to the Great Recession. The timing thus suggests that it is important to consider factors other than just the deep crisis itself or policy changes since the crisis. For the United States, at the frontier of knowledge, there was a burst of innovation and reallocation related to the production and use of information technology in the second half of the 1990s and the early 2000s. That burst ...
Working Paper
Global inflation
This paper shows that inflation in industrialized countries is largely a global phenomenon. First, the inflation rates of 22 OECD countries have a common factor that alone accounts for nearly 70 percent of their variance. This large variance share that is associated with Global Inflation is not only due to the trend components of inflation (up from 1960 to 1980 and down thereafter) but also to fluctuations at business cycle frequencies. Second, we show that, in conformity to the prediction of New Keynesian open economy models, there is little spillover of inflationary shocks across countries. ...
Conference Paper
The output composition puzzle: a difference in the monetary transmission mechanism in the euro area and United States
We revisit recent evidence on how monetary policy affects output and prices in the U.S. and in the euro area. The response patterns to a shift in monetary policy are similar in most respects, but differ noticeably as to the composition of output changes. In the euro area investment is the predominant driver of output changes, while in the U.S. consumption shifts are significantly more important. We dub this difference the output composition puzzle and explore its implications and several potential explanations for it.
Journal Article
Are inflation targets good inflation forecasts?
The authors show that quantified inflation objectives, which have been adopted by many industrialized countries, can be used as rule-of-thumb forecasting devices. Remarkably, they yield smaller forecast errors than widely used forecasting models and the forecasts of professional experts.
Working Paper
Why Have Interest Rates Fallen Far Below the Return on Capital
Risk-free rates have been falling since the 1980s while the return on capital has not. We analyze these trends in a calibrated OLG model with recursive preferences, designed to encompass many of the "usual suspects'' cited in the debate on secular stagnation. Declining labor force and productivity growth imply a limited decline in real interest rates and deleveraging cannot account for the joint decline in the risk free rate and increase in the risk premium. If we allow for a change in the (perceived) risk to productivity growth to fit the data, we find that the decline in the risk-free rate ...