The recent volatility of inflation has provided considerable data to distinguish among competing theories of inflation. The key competing models are the expectations-augmented Phillips curve, a monetarist equation, and the rational expectations model. This paper replicates the results of earlier...

This paper argues that capital-energy complementarity is a short-run phenomenon reflecting the fixed ex post nature of factor employment in a putty-clay technology. When an empirical specification is employed that measures firms' ex ante choice of technique, capital and energy are found to be...

The forecast performances of three groups of models of the inflation process are evalu-ated in this paper: ra tional expectations models with instantaneous market clearing, monetarist models , and expectations-augmented Phillips curves. The dynamic simulations performed for the intervals between...

This paper develops a model of relative price stickiness and examines its implications for the relationship between relative prices, inflation, and the natu ral rate of unemployment. Estimation of the model demonstrates that c ausality in the relationship between relative and aggregate prices ru...

Since the early 1980s, the U.S. economy has changed in some important ways: inflation now rises considerably less when unemployment is low, and the volatility of output and inflation have fallen sharply. This paper examines whether changes in monetary policy can account for these changes in the...

Models with sticky prices are an important part of New Keynesian economics. The author shows that several of the New Keynesian models imply a formulation that is similar to the expectations-augmented Phillips curve of Milton Friedman and Edmund Phelps. He then presents new estimates of the New...

This paper investigates the degree of rigidity in prices of manufactured products in the United States, conditional on labor costs. The author extends Julio J. Rotemberg's model of quadratic price-adjustment costs and finds that prices are costly to adjust: after a year, about 40 percent of...

Long-run restrictions can be imposed on a vector autoregressive model to identify structural macroeconomic shocks, as first proposed by Olivier Blanchard and Danny Quah (1989). Here, the author uses restrictions motivated by Milton Friedman's remark that 'Inflation is always and everywhere a...