A New Structural Analysis of Inflation and Economic Activity

We theoretically investigate the role of expectations in modelling economic activity and the evolution of inflation rates. The New Keynesian Phillips-IS model is extended in our study by having two types of firms with a fraction of firms that uses ‘limited' information to develop their expectations. The remaining firms, which are referred to as forward-looking, would use all information available to set prices and make manufacturing budgets. Then we use UK data to examine the robustness of our extension. To estimate our augmented model, we employ the Uhlig (2005) priori restrictions and the Nakajima (2011a) time-varying parameter regression. Our results suggest that the expectations of each type of firms play an important role in explaining the inflation rate and real economic growth in the UK