Assessing the magnitude of the output gap is critical to achieving an optimal policy mix. Unfortunately, the gap is an unobservable variable, which, in practice, has been estimated in a variety of ways, depending on the preferences of the modeler. This model selection problem leads to a...

We document that past highly inflationary episodes are often characterized by a steeper inflationslack relationship. We show that model-generated data from a standard small Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model can replicate this empirical finding when estimated with different...

This paper estimates a standard Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model that includes a wage and price Phillip's curves with different expectation formation processes for Brazil and the USA. Other than the standard rational expectation process, we also use a limited rationality...

Global inflation has surged to 7.5 percent in August 2022, from an average of 2.1 percent in the decade preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, threatening to become an entrenched phenomenon. This paper disentangles the confluence of contributing factors to the post-pandemic rise in consumer price...

This paper discusses the paper "The Source of Historical Economic Fluctuations: An Analysis using Long-Run Restrictions" by Neville Francis and Valerie A. Ramey. It argues that these authors have made great progress both in the precise measurement of labor input as well as determining the effect...

Estimating natural rate of unemployment (NAIRU) is important for understanding the joint dynamics of unemployment, inflation, and inflation expectation. However, existing literature falls short in endogenizing inflation expectation together with NAIRU in a model consistent way. We develop and...

Estimates of output gaps continue to play a key role in assessments of the stance of business cycles. This paper uses three approaches to examine the historical record of output gap measurements and their use in surveillance within the IMF. Firstly, the historical record of global output gap...

This paper documents five facts about inflation expectations in the euro area. First, individual inflation forecasts overreact to individual news. Second, the cross-section average of individual forecasts of inflation underreact to shocks initially, but overreacts in the medium term. Third,...

We estimate the role of (pre-Ukraine war) supply disruptions in constraining the Covid-19 pandemic recovery, for several advanced economies and emerging markets, and globally. We rely on two approaches. In the first approach, we use sign-restricted Vector Auto Regressions (SVAR) to identify...

Supply constraints hurt the economic recovery and boosted inflation in 2021. We find that in the euro area, manufacturing output and GDP would have been about 6 and 2 percent higher, respectively, and half of the rise in manufacturing producer price inflation would not have occurred in the...