Common shocks, similarities in central bank reaction functions, and international trade potentially produce common components in international inflation rates. This paper characterizes such links in international inflation rates with a dynamic latent factor model that decomposes inflation for 65 countries into world, regional, and idiosyncratic components. The world component accounts for 34% of inflation variability on average across countries, although the importance of this global factor differs substantially across countries. Variables that reflect policy as well as economic and financial development strongly explain the cross-section variation in the relative importance of global influences. A parsimonious model of time variation in the factor loadings shows that most countries became more sensitive to international inflation influences over 1951 2006. In addition, European-specific influences became more important over time for countries participating in European economic and monetary integration.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in its series Working Papers with number
2008-025.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
McCallum, Bennett T., 1990.
"Inflation: Theory and evidence,"
Handbook of Monetary Economics,
in: B. M. Friedman & F. H. Hahn (ed.), Handbook of Monetary Economics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 18, pages 963-1012
Elsevier.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
Reinhart, Carmen & Calvo, Guillermo, 2002.
"Fear of floating,"
MPRA Paper
14000, University Library of Munich, Germany.
[Downloadable!]
Guillermo A. Calvo & Carmen M. Reinhart, 2000.
"Fear of Floating,"
NBER Working Papers
7993, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)