Most wage-contracting models with rational expectations fail to replicate the persistence in inflation observed in the data. We argue that coordination problems and multiple equilibria are the keys to explaining inflation persistence. We develop a wage-contracting model in which workers are...

Most wage-contracting models with rational expectations fail to replicate the persistence in inflation observed in the data. We argue that coordination problems and multiple equilibria are the keys to explaining inflation persistence. We develop a wage-contracting model in which workers are...

In an important paper, Fuhrer and Moore (1995) showed that Taylor (1980)’s staggered wage setting model does not exhibit persistence in inflation; they proposed a simple modification, in which workers cared about the real wages of other workers, which solves this problem. However, we argue...

Macroeconomists have for some time been aware that the New Keynesian Phillips curve, though highly popular in the literature, cannot explain the persistence observed in actual inflation. We argue that one of the more prominent alternative formulations, the Fuhrer and Moore (1995) relative...

This paper analyzes the causes and implications of recent financial crises. Financial crises in general lead to changes in both theory and practice of economics. The paper takes an historical overview. The global consensus of economic theory during the 20th century is discussed. The paper...

This paper provides an overview of the evolution of macroeconomic thought from 1936, the year John Maynard Keynes published his general theory of employment, interest and money to the year 2010. It explores the reasons for the extension of the business cycle during the postwar period. The paper...

This paper studies different types of commitment policy in an economy where the deterministic steady state is inefficient. We show how a policy suggested by the approach of policy design entails positive long-run inflation, even in the purely forward-looking canonical New Keynesian model. The...

This paper investigates how the gains from commitment are large when inflation persistence and data uncertainty coexist. We consider two types of data uncertainty: measurement errors of potential output and inflation. We show that under a situation where data uncertainty exists, there are large...

Despite widespread recognition that credibility is an important determinant of inflation persistence, surprisingly little empirical evidence exists to support this hypothesis. We investigate this hypothesis using data for US and UK. Our results suggest that the degree of inflation persistence is...

Recent empirical contributions assess time changes in inflation persistence by means of simple autoregressive models. Their reliability is discussed in the light of the econometric literature on model misspecification and it is showed that their results can be misleading due to the omission of...