We propose a Bayesian approach to test the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) both as an exact relation and as a noisy/potentially misspecified model. We do so in order to reconcile the contradicting evidence that the NKPC is rejected by a Wald test but nevertheless it provides a good approximation of inflation dynamics. We apply the proposed approach to US and EMU data. When the NKPC is teste...

This paper has two related goals: (i) construct a model where money and credit coexist; (ii) pursue in this setting a theory of endogenous sticky prices that can be taken to the data. Search frictions generate price dispersion, and lead to monetary equilibria where profit-maximizing sellers set nominal prices they sometimes keep fixed when aggregate conditions change. Buyers can use cash or cre...

This paper presents a theory of inflation in an economy with commodity money and supports it by evidence from the inflationary episodes in France during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The paper shows that commodity money can be inflated similarly to fiat money through repeated debasements, which act like devaluation. Furthermore, as with fiat money, demand for commodity money falls wit...

Faced with real and nominal shocks, what should a benevolent central bank do, fix the money growth rate or target the inflation rate? In this paper, we make a first attempt at studying the optimal choice of monetary policy instruments in a micro-founded model of money. Specifically, we produce an overlapping generations economy in which limited communication and stochastic relocation creates an...

Phillips curves are central to discussions of inflation dynamics and monetary policy. New Keynesian Phillips curves describe how past inflation, expected future inflation, and a measure of real marginal cost or an output gap drive the current inflation rate. This paper studies the (potential) weak identification of these curves under generalized methods of moments (GMM) and traces this syndrome...

We use the inflation premium—the difference between nominal and real interest rates—as a proxy for expected inflation in the context of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve. Using data from inflation-indexed and nominal bonds we estimate a forward-looking Phillips curve for the United Kingdom over the period 1985-2004. The proposed model describes UK inflation dynamics considerably better than does...

This paper examines the role of external shocks in explaining macroeconomic fluctuations in African countries. We construct a quantitative, stochastic, dynamic, multi-sector equilibrium model of a small open economy calibrated to represent a "typical" African economy. In our framework, external shocks consist of trade shocks, modeled as fluctuations in the prices of exported primary commodities...

This paper characterizes the properties of various interest-rate rules in a basic forwardlooking model. We compare simple Taylor rules and rules that respond to price-level fluctuations (called Wicksellian rules). We argue that by introducing an appropriate amount of history dependence in policy, Wicksellian rules perform better than optimal Taylor rules in terms of welfare, robustness to alter...

We test for the presence of time-varying parameters (TVP) in the long-run dynamics of energy prices for oil, natural gas and coal, within a standard class of mean-reverting models. We also propose residual-based diagnostic tests and examine out-of-sample forecasts. In-sample LR tests support the TVP model for coal and gas but not for oil, though companion diagnostics suggest that the model is t...

Since John Taylor’s (1993) seminal paper, a large literature has argued that active interest rate feedback rules, that is, rules that respond to increases in inflation with a more than one-for-one increase in the nominal interest rate, are stabilizing. In this paper, we argue that once the zero bound on nominal interest rates is taken into account, active interest-rate feedback rules can easily...