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Working Paper
The Role of Wages in Trend Inflation: Back to the 1980s?
This paper examines whether the measurement of trend inflation can be improved by using wage data in a dynamic factor model of disaggregated prices and wages for the United States. The model features time-varying coefficients and stochastic volatility. An estimate of trend inflation is a time-varying distributed lag of prices and wages, where the weight on a series depends on its time-varying volatility, persistence, and comovement with other series. The results show that wages inform estimates of trend inflation. The weight on wages was highest around 1980, drifted down through the 2000s, ...
Working Paper
Non-Linear Phillips Curves with Inflation Regime-Switching
Building on the results in Nalewaik (FEDS 2015-93), this work models wage growth and core PCE price inflation as regime-switching processes, whose characteristics in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s differ fundamentally from their characteristics in the 1960s and from the mid-1990s to present. The key innovation here is the addition to the models of fundamental driving variables like labor-market slack, and the evidence strongly suggests a non-linear effect of slack on wage growth and core PCE price inflation that becomes much larger after labor markets tighten beyond a certain point. The ...