It is well known that late introduction of new Products into the CPI leads to an upward bias in the index. Moreover, improper treatment of quality improvement in the product will add to the upward bias. In this paper a hedonic elementary price index for accessing the Internet in Canada is constructed. We find that the quality-adjusted price index declines at about 15% per year. Detailed data ar...

This paper investigates the effects of media coverage and macroeconomic conditions on inflation forecast disagreement of German households and professional forecasters. We adopt a Bayesian learning model in which media coverage of inflation affects forecast disagreement by influencing information sets as well as predictor choice. Our empirical results show that disagreement of households depend...

Evidence of smooth transition autoregressive (STAR) representations is found in two, out of three, time series of different measures of annual inflation in Colombia during this decade for monthly data. The STAR-type nonlinearities are asymmetric for inflation computed as the variation of CPI while for (a measure of ) core inflation are symmetric. Thus, LSTAR and ESTAR models were, respectively,...

This paper assesses the presence and importance of neo-Fisher effect in postwar data. It formulates estimates an empirical a New Keynesian model driven by stationary nonstationary monetary real shocks. In accordance with conventional wisdom, temporary increases nominal interest rate are estimated to cause decreases inflation output. The main finding is that permanent shocks increase long run ra...

This paper examines the effects of inflation and currency substitution volatility on the average rates of inflation and currency substitution for twelve emerging market economies. Using a bivariate GARCH-in-Mean model, which accommodates for asymmetric and spillover effects of inflation and currency substitution innovations on their volatilities, we find that for the majority of the countries i...

A challenge to models of equilibrium indeterminacy based on increasing returns is that required increasing returns for generating indeterminacy can be implausibly large and rise quickly with the relative risk aversion in labor. We show that unsynchronized wage adjustment via a relative wage effect can both lower the required degree of increasing returns for indeterminacy to a plausible level an...

This paper estimates a time-varying AR-GARCH model of inflation producing measures of inflation uncertainty for the euro area, and investigates the linkages between them in a VAR framework, also allowing for the possible impact of the policy regime change associated with the start of EMU in 1999. The main findings are as follows. Steady-state inflation and inflation uncertainty have declined st...

The link between US labor cost and price inflation has weakened notably over the past three decades. In this paper we document decline analyse potential contributing factors. We consider four important trends that have shaped economy of late: (i) improved anchoring expectations; (ii) changing constellation shocks hitting economy; (iii) increased trade integration (iv) rising firm market power. ...

We develop a theory of low-frequency movements in inflation expectations, and use it to interpret joint dynamics expectations for the United States other countries over postwar period. In our theory, long-run are endogenous. They driven by short-run surprises, way that depends on recent forecasting performance monetary policy. This distinguishes from common explanations properties inflation. Th...

We study optimal monetary policy in an analytically tractable heterogeneous agent New Keynesian model with rich cross-sectional heterogeneity. Optimal differs from a representative benchmark because can affect consumption inequality, by stabilizing risk arising both idiosyncratic shocks and unequal exposures to aggregate shocks. The trade-off between productive efficiency, price stability is su...