It is an open question whether and how indexed wage contracts reduce welfare or raise average inflation. This paper … analyzes the impact of indexed wage contracts on inflation and social welfare in a Barro–Gordon model with discretionary … monetary policy by endogenizing social costs of indexation. Main results are: Wage indexation reduces the inflation bias but …

Keynesian model we show that, if households have hyperbolic discounting, small positive rates of inflation can be optimal. In … our baseline calibration, the optimal rate of inflation is 2.1% and remains positive across a wide range of calibrations. …

stronger bargaining position when they try to prevent a cut in money wages. If inflation is so low that some money wages have … to be cut, workers‘ stronger bargaining position requires higher unemployment in equilibrium. However, inflation is more … stable when money wage rigidity binds, providing an incentive for monetary policy makers to choose a low target for inflation …

economic performance under inflation targets, and arguments that the flexible exchange rate has undermined real economic …

independence and inflation. Making use of data on the evolution of central bank independence over time and controlling for possible … country’s inflation performance. Examining a cross-section of up to 69 countries, we are able to show that granting a central … bank more autonomy does not necessarily lead to better inflation performance. To lower inflation by increasing independence …

constant inflation. This change has been more pronounced than elsewhere. We argue that this stems from the immigration boom in … 1995 would have led to an annual increase in inflation of 2.5 percentage points if it had not been largely offset by …

, we follow Roberts (1997) and Adam and Padula (2003) and use direct measures of inflation expectations. The data source is … the Ifo World Economic Survey, which quarterly polls economic experts about their expected future development of inflation … turns out to more relevant for most countries in our sample. (ii) The use of survey data for inflation expectations yields a …

indexation to past inflation to vary according to the monetary policy regime. We find that the extent of wage indexation is … significantly lower in an inflation targeting regime, in contrast to monetary targeting, exchange rate targeting and policy regimes …

compares price inflation before the crisis with the necessary and actual price cuts that have taken place since the outbreak of … the crisis, predicting a decade of stagnation for the south and inflation for the north. Keynesian demand policy is …