This paper highlights relative price adjustments taking place in the global economy as important sources of the lower levels of inflation rates observed in the recent decades. Using a markup model, it shows substantial effects from declines in wage costs and import prices relative to consumer...

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...

Recent work on U.S. data calls into question the ability of simple Phillips curvemodels to forecast inflation. This paper asks whether there is similar evidence of abreakdown in the forecasting ability of Phillips curve models in other OECD countries.The results suggests that the ability of a...

In this paper, we investigate the information content of implied probabilities (Back and Brown, 1993) to improve estimation in unconditional moment conditions models. We propose and evaluate two 3-step euclidian empirical likelihood estimators and their bias-correction versions for weakly...

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve is at the center of two raging empirical debates. First, how can purely forward looking pricing account for the observed persistence in aggregate inflation. Second, price-setting responds to movements in marginal costs, which should therefore be the driving force...

This paper extends Galí and Gertler’s (1999) new hybrid KeynesianPhillips curve to the open economy context. We hypothesise that pricing decisionsdepend on both labour costs and intermediate imported input prices. The results forHong Kong are consistent with the theory if import prices are...

Using a standard dynamic general equilibrium model, we show that the interaction of staggered nominal contracts with hyperbolic discounting leads to inflation having significant long-run effects on real variables...

In 1994, Blanchflower and Oswald reported that they have found an empirical law of economics the Wage Curve. According to their empirical results, the elasticity of wages with respect to regional unemployment is -0.1. This holds especially for the Anglo-Saxon countries...

The Phillips curve has flattened in Spain over 1995-2006: unemployment has fallen by 15percentage points, with roughly constant inflation. This change has been more pronouncedthan elsewhere...

We examine the global dimension of inflation in 24 OECD countries between 1980 and 2007in a traditional Phillips curve framework. We decompose output gaps and changes in unitlabor costs into common (or global) and idiosyncratic components using a factor analysis andintroduce these components...