New Keynesian Phillips Curve Research Articles

Deep Habits in the New Keynesian Phillips Curve

We derive and estimate a New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) in a model where consumers are assumed to have deep habits. Habits are deep in the sense that they apply to individual consumption goods instead of aggregate consumption. This alters the NKPC in a fundamental manner as it introduces expected and contemporaneous consumption growth as well as the expected marginal value of future demand as additional driving forces for inflation dynamics. We construct the driving process in the deep habits NKPC by using the model's optimality conditions to impute time series for unobservable variables. The resulting series is considerably more volatile than unit labor cost. General Methods of Moments (GMM) estimation of the NKPC shows an improved fit and a much lower degree of indexation than in the standard NKPC. Our analysis also reveals that the crucial parameters for the performance of the deep habit NKPC are the habit parameter and the substitution elasticity between differentiated products. The results are broadly robust to alternative specifications.

Inflation persistence in central and southeastern Europe: Evidence from univariate and structural time series approaches

The purpose of this paper is to measure inflation persistence in the following countries of Central and Southeastern Europe: Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Serbia. The study sample covers monthly data from January, 1995 to May, 2010 for Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, from January 1994 to May, 2010 for the Czech Republic, and from January, 2002 to June 2010 for Romania. The shortest sample used, from January, 2003 to September, 2010, was for Serbia and is due to the late start in the transition process. The results of this study enriched the existing ones on this topic by extending the sample period to cover even the recent years of relatively higher inflation rates and by including Romania and Serbia, which were not previously considered. The study led to two main findings: first, inflation of moderate to high magnitude persistence in Hungary, Poland, Romania and Serbia, and inflation of smaller order persistence in Slovakia and the Czech Republic was detected within the Markov switching model approach. In addition, the changes in inflation persistence often correspond to changes in variability and mean of inflation. Second, New Keynesian Phillips Curve represents a valid structural approach to describe the inflation dynamics in this region. In all the six cases studied, weights on backward and forward looking behaviors were significant, while the impact of the driving variable was insignificant only once. It is found that significant influence of the economic driving variable can be captured by real gross wage inflation and real broad money growth. The estimates show that the backward-looking term plays an important role in determining the inflation dynamics. Similar conclusions are drawn by using quarterly data in econometric estimations for the selected countries.

Inflation Dynamics: Evidence from a Small Open Economy

We estimate New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) for a small open economy. Empirical performance of NKPC for open economy is at par with closed economy specification. Results are robust when different proxies are used for output gap and are stable across time periods. Inflation in Pakistan is determined by both past inflation as well as inflationary expectation and also by terms of trade. Output gap is not significant in explaining inflation in Pakistan.

The asymmetry of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve in the euro-area

Using a two-stage quantile regression framework, we uncover significant asymmetries across quantiles for all coefficients in an otherwise standard New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) for the euro area. A pure NKPC specification accurately captures inflation dynamics at high inflation quantiles.

Inflation and marginal cost: on the importance of their covariance

Many researchers have found that estimating the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) using the output gap to proxy for real marginal cost tends to produce a counter-intuitive coefficient sign in the model, whereas using the labour income share produces the expected coefficient sign. This article investigates the potential cause of this puzzle: What causes these differing signs for the coefficient for real marginal cost? We find that this coefficient sign crucially depends on the covariance between inflation and marginal cost. Moreover, this covariance in turn critically depends on the cyclicality of the marginal cost proxy that is used.

New Keynesian Phillips Curve and inflation dynamics in Australia

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) was developed as a response to the New Classical critique that Keynesian macroeconomics lacked micro-foundations. The NKPC provides theoretical micro-foundations that attempt to explain, inter alia, nominal rigidities and, explicitly price stickiness. This paper investigates the validity of the NKPC for Australia. In contrast to the findings for the USA and Euro area, we find that neither the output gap nor marginal cost appears to be a key driving force variable across different set of instruments and estimators (GMM and 2SLS) over the sample period from 1959 to 2009. The flattening of the NKPC along with significant presence of price stickiness is also found in the data. In particular, the reduced form coefficients and implied estimates from the structural parameters of the model support the view that inflation dynamics are forward looking while the role of lagged inflation is also statistically important only after 1980s. However, we claim that the forward looking baseline NKPC contrary to the hybrid NKPC is stable and better explains inflation dynamics for the Australian economy.

Inflation Dynamics in the New EU Member States: How Relevant Are External Factors?

AbstractIn this paper we evaluate the relative influence of external versus domestic inflation drivers in the 12 new European Union (EU) member countries. Our empirical analysis is based on the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) derived in Galí and Monacelli (2005) for small open economies (SOE). Employing the generalized method of moments (GMM), we find that the SOE NKPC is well supported in the new EU member states. We also find that the inflation process is dominated by domestic variables in the larger countries of our sample, whereas external variables are mostly relevant in the smaller countries.

THE NEW KEYNESIAN PHILLIPS CURVE: IN SEARCH OF IMPROVEMENTS FOR ADAPTATION TO THE TURKISH ECONOMY

This paper provides a survey of the vast literature on the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) by attempting to give a complete picture of the many disagreements surrounding the NKPC from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. A few NKPC studies that are applied to Turkish data provide mixed evidence on the validity of this curve for the Turkish economy. The NKPC models employed in the Turkish literature do not account for one or more key structural features of the Turkish economy and thereby give rise to the reported conflicting results. These studies employ different modeling approaches especially when open economy factors are introduced. The NKPC model for the Turkish economy should combine imported intermediate goods with incomplete exchange rate pass through in import prices. The incomplete pass through assumption allows one to model import pricing decisions and the inclusion of imported intermediate inputs to the production function reflects an empirical regularity for the Turkish economy. In Turkey most of goods imported by Turkey are at the intermediate level and constitute a large fraction of the costs of the industry.

Estimation of Forward-Looking Relationships in Closed Form: An Application to the New Keynesian Phillips Curve

We illustrate the importance of placing model-consistent restrictions on expectations in the estimation of forward-looking Euler equations. In two-stage limited-information settings where first-stage estimates are used to proxy for expectations, parameter estimates can differ substantially, depending on whether these restrictions are imposed or not. This is shown in an application to the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC), first in a Monte Carlo exercise, and then on actual data. The closed-form (CF) estimates require by construction that expectations of inflation be model-consistent at all points in time, while the difference-equation (DE) estimates impose no model discipline on expectations. Between those two polar extremes there is a wide range of alternative DE specifications based on the same dynamic relationship that explicitly imposes model restrictions on expectations for a finite number of periods. In our application, these last estimates quickly converge to the CF estimates and illustrate that the DE estimates in Cogley and Sbordone (2008) are not robust to imposing modest model requirements on expectations. In particular, our estimates show that the NKPC is not purely forward-looking, and thus that time-varying trend inflation is insufficient to explain inflation persistence.

Inflation Dynamics in FYR Macedonia

In this paper we study the dynamics of inflation in Macedonia, provide three forecasting tools and draw some policy conclusions from the quantitative results. We explore three forecasting methods for inflation. We use a Dynamic Factor Model (DFM) for short-term, monthly forecasting. We also develop two quarterly models: A Vector Error Correction Model (VECM), and a New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) for a more structural model of inflation. The NKPC shows a significant effect of output gap and inflation expectations on current inflation, confirming that the expectations channel of monetary transmission mechanism is strong. In terms of forecast-error variance, we show that all three models do very well in one-period ahead forecasting.

Inflation Dynamics and Real Marginal Costs: New Evidence from U.S. Manufacturing Industries

This paper deals with the analysis of price-setting in U.S. manufacturing industries. Recent studies have heavily criticized the ability of the New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) to fit aggregate infl‡ation [see, e.g., Rudd and Whelan, 2006, Can Rational Expectations Sticky-Price Models Explain Inflation Dynamics, American Economic Review, vol. 96(1), pp. 303-320 ]. We challenge this evidence, showing that forward-looking behavior as implied by the New Keynesian model of price-setting is widely supported at the sectoral level. In fact, current and expected future values of the income share of intermediate goods emerge as an effective driver of in‡ation dynamics. Unlike alternative proxies for the forcing variable, the cost of intermediate goods presents dynamic properties in line with the predictions of the New Keynesian theory.

Inflation Dynamics and Real Marginal Costs: New Evidence from U.S. Manufacturing Industries

This paper deals with the analysis of price-setting in U.S. manufacturing industries. Recent studies have heavily criticized the ability of the New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) to fit aggregate inflation [see, e.g., Rudd and Whelan, 2006, Can Rational Expectations Sticky-Price Models Explain Inflation Dynamics?, American Economic Review, vol. 96(1), pp. 303-320 ]. We challenge this evidence, showing that forward-looking behavior as implied by the New Keynesian model of price-setting is widely supported at the sectoral level. In fact, current and expected future values of the income share of intermediate goods emerge as an effective driver of inflation dynamics. Unlike alternative proxies for the forcing variable, the cost of intermediate goods presents dynamic properties in line with the predictions of the New Keynesian theory.

Technology, Utilization and Inflation: What Drives the New Keynesian Phillips Curve?

We argue that the New-Keynesian Phillips Curve literature has failed to deliver a convincing measure of real marginal costs. We start from a careful modeling of optimal price setting allowing for non-unitary factor substitution, non-neutral technical change and time-varying factor utilization rates. This ensures the resulting real marginal cost measures match volatility reductions and level changes witnessed in many US time series. The cost measure comprises conventional counter-cyclical cost elements plus pro-cyclical (and co-varying) utilization rates. Although pro-cyclical elements seem to dominate, the components of real marginal cost components are becoming less cyclical over time. Incorporating this richer driving variable produces more plausible price-stickiness estimates than otherwise and suggests a more balanced weight of backward and forward-looking inflation expectations than commonly found. Our results challenge existing views of inflation determinants and have important implications for modeling inflation in New-Keynesian models.

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve Tested on OECD Panel Data

In their work, Gali­, Gertler and Lopez-Salido, GGL, assert that the hybrid New Keynesian Phillips curve (NPC) with dominance of forward-looking behavior and real marginal costs is robust to choices of estimation procedure, details of variables definitions and choice of data samples. In an estimation on panel data from OECD countries we replicate the typical empirical NPC from country studies. However, we also test an alternative economic interpretation of the empirical correlations. Specifically we find that the expected rate of future inflation and real marginal costs serve as replacements for equilibrium correction terms that are implied by the general imperfect competition model of wage and price setting. As a explanatory model of OECD inflation, the NPC is encompassed by an existing theory.

Reconciling microeconomic and macroeconomic estimates of price stickiness

This paper attempts to reconcile the high estimates of price stickiness from macroeconomic estimates of a New-Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) with the lower values obtained from surveys of firms’ pricing behaviour. This microeconomic evidence also suggests that the frequency with which firms adjust their prices varies across sectors. Building on the insights of Carvalho (2006), we present Monte Carlo evidence that suggests that in the presence of this heterogeneity estimates of the NKPC obtained using conventional methods, such as GMM, are likely to considerably overstate the degree of aggregate price stickiness. Furthermore, if roundabout production is a characteristic of the economy the NKPC will falsely suggest that a sizeable fraction of prices are indexed to past inflation. These problems arise because of a type of misspecification and a lack of suitable instruments.

INFLATION DYNAMICS AND SUBJECTIVE EXPECTATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES

I. INTRODUCTION This paper analyzes the ability of sticky-price models to explain the dynamics of U.S. inflation when using survey data as proxies for inflation expectations. Testing sticky-price models with survey expectations is attractive since, to the extent that survey data correctly capture agents' expectations, they allow to disregard issues related to the specification of agents' expectations functions. One neither has to impose untested orthogonality restrictions, as required when estimating under the assumption of rational expectations, nor has to make restrictive assumptions about the precise form of nonrationality present in agents' forecast functions. This allows to focus on the question whether the economic models under consideration are correctly specified. Previous tests of sticky-price models, performed under the assumption that agents hold rational expectations, have generated mixed results. Prominently, Fuhrer and Moore (1995) have reported that sticky-price models do not generate sufficient stickiness for inflation when the output gap is used as a measure of real marginal costs. Recent evidence, however, has shown that the empirical performance depends crucially on how one measures real marginal costs, the main determinant of inflation according to sticky-price models. For instance, Gall and Gertler (1999) and Sbordone (2002) show that sticky-price models perform well once marginal costs are approximated by average unit labor costs. (1) It makes an important difference whether sticky-price models successfully explain inflation dynamics as a function of output behavior or they relate inflation dynamics to the behavior of unit labor costs. Given that the ultimate objective is a model explaining the joint behavior of output and inflation, the latter case would require an additional empirically plausible theory linking the dynamics of unit labor costs to the behavior of output. This paper studies whether the currently popular New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC), which can be derived from Calvo (1983) style sticky-price models, is able to explain a relationship between inflation on the one hand and output or unit labor costs on the other hand. Thus, we let the data speak whether a theory linking output to costs is warranted, once expectations are approximated by data reported in the Survey of Professional Forecasters. Our main finding is that the NKPC performs equally well with both measures of marginal costs, output and unit labor costs. Whatever measure is used, the estimate of the quarterly discount factor is close to one and the point estimate of the degree of price stickiness implies that firms reset their prices roughly every five quarters on average. These results suggest that potential nonrationalities in expectations, as they show up in surveys, have biased previous estimates using output as a measure for marginal costs. Quite surprisingly, the same nonrationalities do not seem to play a role when using unit labor costs. Here our estimates confirm the results obtained by Gall and Gertler (1999) and Sbordone (2002), who assumed rational expectations. We show that the reason for this finding is that approximating the agents' information set using the unit labor cost variable rests on more solid grounds than approximating it using the output variable. In particular, the survey data suggest that the hypothesis of rational expectations implies a too high correlation between lagged output and future inflation expectations. We show that this causes the coefficient estimate for output to become negative, contrary to what is implied by theory. These results suggest that once one takes account of potentially nonrational expectations via survey expectations, sticky-price models are able to establish a close link between output dynamics and the behavior of inflation. To assess the robustness of this finding, we include into the price equation lags of various variables and test for their significance. …

ARROW-CALVO PRICE STAGGERING

We merge Arrow and Calvo pricing themes leading to a price-resetting signal dependent on inflation and competitiveness. This allows us to tractably analyse state-dependent issues and to develop a New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) expressed for the levels of variables and a specification which is not regime dependent. The standard NKPC arises as a special case. Using non-linear simulation and estimation techniques, we then demonstrate the importance of regime dependence in inflation dynamics and show that standard NKPCs are mis-specified even in low-inflation regimes. We further detect strong intrinsic persistence in historical US inflation.

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve of Rational Expectations: A Serial Correlation Extension

This paper evaluates the empirical validity of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) model of rational expectations. We employ an instrumental variable (IV) projection method to approximate inflation expectations, and show that the inference based on this approach can differ significantly from the one based on rational expectations. More importantly, using an IV test for serial correlation in the GMM context, we find that the error term in the stylized NKPC model is significantly serially correlated. To compensate for the serial correlation problem, we propose an extended framework which can be easily rationalized in terms of sticky price setting of backward-looking firms. Empirical results show that further lags of inflation are needed in the hybrid specification of the NKPC in order to rule out serial correlation in the Euler equation.

Evaluating the German (New Keynesian) Phillips curve

This paper evaluates the New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) and its hybrid variant within a limited information framework for Germany. The main interest resides in the average frequency of price re-optimization by firms. We use the labor income share as the driving variable and consider a source of real rigidity by allowing for a fixed firm-specific capital stock. A GMM estimation strategy is employed as well as an identification robust method based on the Anderson–Rubin statistic. We find that the German Phillips curve is purely forward-looking. Moreover, our point estimates are consistent with the view that firms re-optimize prices every 2–3 quarters. These estimates seem plausible from an economic point of view. But the uncertainties around these estimates are very large and also consistent with perfect nominal price rigidity, where firms never re-optimize prices. This analysis also offers some explanation as to why previous results for the German NKPC based on GMM differ considerably. First, standard GMM results are very sensitive to the way in which orthogonality conditions are formulated. Further, model mis-specifications may be left undetected by conventional J tests. This analysis points out the need for identification robust methods to get reliable estimates for the NKPC.

GMM and OLS Estimation and Inference for New Keynesian Phillips Curve

This paper considers estimation situations where identification, endogeneity and non-spherical regression error problems are present. Instead of always using GMM despite weak instruments to solve the endogeneity, it is possible to first check whether endogeneity is serious enough to cause inconsistency in the particular problem at hand. We show how to use Maximum Entropy bootstrap (meboot) for nonstationary time series data and check `convergence in probability and `almost sure convergence' by evaluating the proportion of sample paths straying outside error bounds as the sample size increases. The new Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation for US data finds little endogeneity-induced inconsistency and that GMM seems to worsen it. The potential `lack of identification' problem is solved by replacing the traditional pivot which divides an estimate by its standard error by the Godambe pivot, as explained in Vinod (2008} and Vinod (2010), leading to superior confidence intervals for deep parameters of the NKPC model.