The remarkable stability of low domestic inflation in many countries requires explanation. In this paper, a number of competing hypotheses are evaluated on a stand-alone basis, and all are found to be inadequate. This includes the view that this outcome has been solely the result of more...

There has been mounting evidence that the inflation process has been changing. Inflation is now much lower and much more stable around the globe. And its sensitivity to measures of economic slack and increases in input costs appears to have declined. Probably the most widely supported...

Assigning a discretionary central bank a mandate to stabilize an average inflation rate - rather than a period-by-period inflation rate - increases welfare in a New Keynesian model with an occasionally binding lower bound on nominal interest rates. Under rational expectations, the...

We study how domestic and global output gaps affect CPI inflation. We use a New Keynesian Phillips curve framework, which controls for non-linear exchange rate movements for a panel of 26 advanced and 22 emerging economies covering the 1994Q1-2017Q4 period. We find broadly that both global and...

Monetary economics as practiced by central bank modelers has made a great deal of progress in recent years. In a 2002 paper I interviewed research economists at four central banks and surveyed the models in use at those banks. I criticized the models for having lost all touch with statistical...

We provide new insights on the formation of inflation expectations - in particular at a time of great financial and economic turmoil - by evaluating results from a survey conducted from July 2009 through July 2010. Participants in this survey answered a weekly questionnaire about their short-,...

Greater international economic interconnectedness over recent decades has been changing inflation dynamics. This paper presents evidence that the expansion of global value chains (GVCs), ie cross-border trade in intermediate goods and services, is an important channel through which global...

Beginning with the global financial crisis (2008) the correlation between crude oil prices and medium-term and forward inflation expectations increased leading to fears of their un-anchoring. Using the first principal component of commodity prices as a measure for global aggregate demand, we...

Demographic shifts, such as population ageing, have been suggested as possible explanations for the past decade's low inflation. We exploit cross-country variation in a long panel to identify age structure effects in inflation, controlling for standard monetary factors. A robust relationship...

Informality is an entrenched structural trait in emerging market economies, despite of the progress achieved in macroeconomic management. Informality determines the behavior of labour markets, financial access and the productivity of the overall economy. Therefore it influences the transmission...