Inflation Persistence and Structural Breaks: The Experience of Inflation Targeting Countries and the US

This paper reports on a sequential three-stage analysis of inflation persistence using monthly data from 11 inflation targeting (IT) countries and, for comparison, the US, a non IT country with a history of credible monetary policy. First, we estimate inflation persistence in a rolling-window fractional integration setting using the semiparametric estimator suggested by Phillips (2007). Second, we use tests for unknown structural breaks as a means to identify effects of the regime switch and the global financial crisis on inflation persistence. We use the sequences of estimated persistence measures from the first stage as dependent variables in the Bai and Perron (2003) structural break tests. These results suggest that four countries (Canada, Iceland, Mexico, and South Korea) experience a structural break in inflation persistence that coincide with the implementation of the IT regime, and three IT countries (Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK), as well as the US experience a structural break in inflation persistence that coincides with the global financial crisis. Finally, we reapply the Phillips (2007) estimator to the subsamples defined by the breaks. We find that in most cases the estimates of inflation persistence switch from mean-reversion nonstationarity to mean-reversion stationarity.