IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/32194.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

What Drives Inflation? Lessons from Disaggregated Price Data

Author

Listed:
  • Elisa Rubbo

Abstract

The Covid pandemic disrupted supply chains and labor markets, with heterogeneous effects on demand and supply across industries. Meanwhile governments responded with unprecedented stimulus packages, and inflation increased to its highest values in 40 years. In this paper I investigate the contribution of aggregate monetary and fiscal policies to inflation, compared to industry-specific disruptions. I argue that, in an economy where multiple industries and primary factors have heterogeneous supply curves, industry-specific shocks to inelastically supplied goods increase aggregate inflation through a cost-push shock. Moreover industry-specific and aggregate shocks have different effects on relative prices, which allows me to identify their respective contribution to aggregate inflation. For US consumer prices, I find that deflation and subsequent inflation in 2020 were due to industry-specific shocks, while since 2021 inflation is primarily driven by aggregate factors.

Suggested Citation

  • Elisa Rubbo, 2024. "What Drives Inflation? Lessons from Disaggregated Price Data," NBER Working Papers 32194, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32194
    Note: EFG ME
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w32194.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E30 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - General (includes Measurement and Data)
    • E5 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32194. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.