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Journal Article
Is the Last Mile More Arduous?
US inflation surged starting in spring 2021, with Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation reaching a 40-year high of 9 percent in mid-2022. Together with improving supply-chain conditions, policy tightening by the Fed decreased inflation to within 1 to 2 percentage points of its 2 percent target by late 2023 without a significant increase in unemployment. However, concerns have been raised that the last mile of disinflation to reduce inflation consistently to its 2 percent target will be more arduous than the previous miles. Close examination of such concerns indicates that they do not receive ...
Report
Aggregation and the PPP puzzle in a sticky-price model
We study the purchasing power parity (PPP) puzzle in a multisector, two-country, sticky-price model. Firms' price stickiness differs across sectors, in accordance with recent microeconomic evidence on price setting in various countries. Combined with local currency pricing, these differences lead sectoral real exchange rates to exhibit heterogeneous dynamics. We show that in this economy, deviations of the real exchange rate from PPP are more volatile and persistent when compared with a counterfactual one-sector world economy that features the same average frequency of price changes and is ...
Working Paper
Can Supply Shocks Be Inflationary with a Flat Phillips Curve?
Not in standard models. With conventional pricing frictions, imposing a flat Phillips curve also imposes a price level that is rigid with respect to supply shocks. In the New Keynesian model, price markup shocks need to be several orders of magnitude bigger than other shocks in order to fit the data, leading to unreasonable assessments of the magnitude of the increase in costs during inflationary episodes. To account for the facts, we propose a strategic microfoundation of shock-dependent price stickiness: prices are sticky with respect to demand shocks but flexible with respect to supply ...