In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, G7 central banks have launched asset purchase programs in anticipation of an increase in government bond offerings to finance ballooning fiscal deficits. As the volume of government bonds owned by private investors is not expected to rise during the current...

We analyze the evolution and drivers of inflation during the pandemic and the likely trajectory of inflation in the near-term using an event study of inflation around global recessions and a factor-augmented vector auto-regression (FAVAR) model. We report three main results. First, the decline...