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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.
Working Paper
Bargaining Under Liquidity Constraints: Nash vs. Kalai in the Laboratory
We report on an experiment in which buyers and sellers engage in semi-structured bargaining in two dimensions: how much of a good the seller will produce and how much money the buyer will offer the seller in exchange. Our aim is to evaluate the empirical relevance of two axiomatic bargaining solutions, the generalized Nash bargaining solution and Kalai's proportional bargaining solution. These bargaining solutions predict different outcomes when buyers are constrained in their money holdings. We first use the case when the buyer is not liquidity constrained to estimate the bargaining power ...
Newsletter
What Is the Impact of Monetary Policy on Households’ Desired Labor Supply?
Do people adjust how much they want to work when the central bank’s monetary policy stance shifts? More specifically, does an interest rate hike induce individuals to work more or fewer hours? And does this effect differ across households with different levels of income (or earnings)? In this article, we discuss our recent research that explores these and related questions. One notable finding is that employed individuals at the bottom of the income distribution want to work more when monetary policy tightens.
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 ...
Working Paper
On the Mechanics of Fiscal Inflations
The goal of this paper is twofold. First, we wish to better explain the relationship between Sargent and Wallace’s (1981) unpleasant monetarist arithmetic, the closely connected fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL), and the monetarist view of inflation. Second, we discuss how the recent inflationary episode has contributed to redistributing real resources from holders of government debt to the public purse. In particular, financial prices before the onset of the Covid pandemic suggest that investors viewed an inflationary shock such as the one we experienced as extremely unlikely, so the ...