Search Results
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.
Report
The Drivers of Inflation Dynamics during the Pandemic: (Early) Evidence from Disaggregated Consumption Data
What explains inflation dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic? This brief focuses on the relative roles of demand and supply factors. Prices and quantities of consumed goods and services are positively correlated following demand changes and negatively correlated in response to supply disturbances. Employing disaggregated indexes from personal consumption expenditures data, this brief documents a positive relationship between prices and quantities during the early stages of the pandemic, followed by a negative relationship in the later period. Thus, while the short deflation episode in March ...
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 ...
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 ...
Report
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
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.
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
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
Fiscal multipliers in advanced and developing countries: evidence from military spending
Using novel data on military spending for 129 countries in the period 1988?2013, this paper provides new evidence on the effects of government spending on output in advanced and developing countries. Identifying government-spending shocks with an exogenous variation in military spending, we estimate one-year fiscal multipliers in the range 0.75-0.85. The cumulative multipliers remain significantly different from zero within three years after the shock. We find substantial heterogeneity in the multipliers across groups of countries. We then explore three potential sources leading to ...
Working Paper
Inflation expectations and nonlinearities in the Phillips curve
This paper shows that a simple form of nonlinearity in the Phillips curve can explain why, following the Great Recession, inflation did not decrease as much as predicted by linear Phillips curves, a phenomenon known as the missing disinflation. We estimate a piecewise-linear specification and document that the data favor a model with two regions, with the response of inflation to an increase in unemployment slower in the region where unemployment is already high. Nonlinearities remain important, even when we account for other factors proposed in the literature, such as consumer expectations ...