How much nominal rigidity is there in the US economy? Testing a new Keynesian DSGE model using indirect inference

We evaluate the Smets–Wouters New Keynesian model of the US postwar period, using indirect inference, the bootstrap and a VAR representation of the data. We find that the model is strongly rejected. While an alternative (New Classical) version of the model fares no better, adding limited nominal rigidity to it produces a ‘weighted’ model version closest to the data. But on data from 1984 onwards – the ‘great moderation’ – the best model version is one with a high degree of nominal rigidity, close to New Keynesian. Our results are robust to a variety of methodological and numerical issues.