This note identifies supply factors, particularly the exchange rate, as key drivers of inflation in South Africa. Demand factors play a negligible role, with a flat Phillips curve apparent since the inception of the country's inflation targeting regime. The Phillips curve flattened further with...

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...

We construct an empirical test of whether the anticipation of adoption of inflation targeting affects the inflation rate. We observe that most of the central banks adopt the regime after first achieving significant disinflation. With pre-inflation-targeting-disinflation, initial targets are met...

This paper presents a new methodology for the determination of the just noticeable difference which is required for the quantification of qualitative survey data. Traditional conversion methods, such as the probability approach of Carlson and Parkin (1975), the regression method of Pesaran...

Although uncertainty plays an important role in economic decisionmaking, empirical measures of individuals' uncertainty are rare. The literature on cognition and communication documents that people use round numbers to convey uncertainty. This paper introduces a method of quantifying the...

The present paper uses survey data on expected consumer price developments to analyse the role of inflation expectations in the inflation process. The survey measures of price expectations are derived from the European Commission's Consumer Survey and from the surveys of professional experts...

Inflation has been well contained over the last decades in most industrialized countries. This implies, however, that memories of high inflation are likely to fade, because over time larger parts of the population have never experienced high inflation, whereas those who have might forget. This...

Central banks have used different types of forward guidance, where the forward guidance horizon is related to a state contingency, a calendar date or left open-ended. This paper reports cross-country evidence on the impact of these different types of forward guidance on the sensitivity of bond...