Search Results
Working Paper
Drifting Inflation Targets and Monetary Stagflation
This paper revisits the phenomenon of stagflation. Using a standard New Keynesian dynamic, stochastic general equilibrium model, we show that stagflation from monetary policy alone is a very common occurrence when the economy is subject to both deviations from the policy rule and a drifting inflation target. Once the inflation target is fixed, the incidence of stagflation in the baseline model is essentially eliminated. In contrast with several other recent papers that have focused on the connection between monetary policy and stagflation, we show that while high uncertainty about monetary ...
Working Paper
Stagflation and Topsy-Turvy Capital Flows
Are unregulated capital flows excessive during a stagflation episode? We argue that they likely are, owing to a macroeconomic externality operating through the economy’s supply side. Inflows raise domestic wages through a wealth effect on labor supply and cause unwelcome upward pressure on marginal costs in countries where monetary policy is trying to drive down costs to stabilize inflation. Yet, market forces are likely to generate such inflows. Optimal capital flow management instead requires net outflows, suggesting topsy-turvy capital flows following markup shocks.
Working Paper
Soft Landing or Stagflation? A Framework for Estimating the Probabilities of Macro Scenarios
Amid ongoing trade policy shifts and geopolitical uncertainty, concerns about stagflation have reemerged as a key macroeconomic risk. This paper develops a probabilistic framework to estimate the likelihood of stagflation versus soft landing scenarios over a four-quarter horizon. Building on Bekaert, Engstrom, and Ermolov (2025), the model integrates survey forecasts, structural shock decomposition, and a non-Gaussian BEGE-GARCH approach to capture time-varying volatility and skewness. Results suggest that the probability of stagflation was elevated at around 30 percent in late 2022, while ...
Journal Article
Real-Time Discovery of Corporate Risks
We propose a new methodology to discover emerging corporate risks in real time by analyzing the text of quarterly earnings conference calls from 2008 to 2025. Our approach identifies bigrams (two-word phrases) within risk-related sentences whose usage surges significantly and then groups them into thematic topics. The method successfully recovers a timeline of major economic events, from the credit crisis in 2008 to macroeconomic and tariff uncertainty in 2025. We find that firms manage these risks differently. While macroeconomic uncertainty is associated with reductions in investment and ...