IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ier/iecrev/v48y2007i1p111-145.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Staggered Price Contracts And Inflation Persistence: Some General Results

Author

Listed:
  • Karl Whelan

Abstract

Despite their popularity as theoretical tools for illustrating the effects of nominal rigidities, some have questioned whether models based on staggered price contracts with rational expectations can match the persistence of the empirical inflation process. This article presents some general results about this class of models. It is shown that these models do not have a problem matching high autocorrelations for inflation. However, they fail to explain a key feature of reduced-form Phillips-curve regressions: The positive dependence of inflation on its own lags. It is shown that staggered price contracting models instead predict that the coefficients on these lag terms should be negative. Copyright 2007 by the Economics Department Of The University Of Pennsylvania And Osaka University Institute Of Social And Economic Research Association.

Suggested Citation

  • Karl Whelan, 2007. "Staggered Price Contracts And Inflation Persistence: Some General Results," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 48(1), pages 111-145, February.
  • Handle: RePEc:ier:iecrev:v:48:y:2007:i:1:p:111-145
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. V. V. Chari & Patrick J. Kehoe & Ellen R. McGrattan, 2000. "Sticky Price Models of the Business Cycle: Can the Contract Multiplier Solve the Persistence Problem?," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 68(5), pages 1151-1180, September.
    2. Taylor, John B, 1979. "Staggered Wage Setting in a Macro Model," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 69(2), pages 108-113, May.
    3. Jeff Fuhrer & George Moore, 1995. "Inflation Persistence," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 110(1), pages 127-159.
    4. Michael Dotsey, 2002. "Pitfalls in interpreting tests of backward-looking pricing in New Keynesian models," Economic Quarterly, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, issue Win, pages 37-50.
    5. Gerard O'Reilly & Karl Whelan, 2005. "Has Euro-Area Inflation Persistence Changed Over Time?," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 87(4), pages 709-720, November.
    6. Fuhrer, Jeffrey C., 2010. "Inflation Persistence," Handbook of Monetary Economics, in: Benjamin M. Friedman & Michael Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Monetary Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 9, pages 423-486, Elsevier.
    7. Gali, Jordi & Gertler, Mark & Lopez-Salido, J. David, 2001. "European inflation dynamics," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 45(7), pages 1237-1270.
    8. Fagan, Gabriel & Henry, Jérôme & Mestre, Ricardo, 2001. "An area-wide model (AWM) for the euro area," Working Paper Series 42, European Central Bank.
    9. Guerrieri, Luca, 2006. "The Inflation Persistence of Staggered Contracts," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 38(2), pages 483-494, March.
    10. Gali, Jordi & Gertler, Mark, 1999. "Inflation dynamics: A structural econometric analysis," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 44(2), pages 195-222, October.
    11. Binder,M. & Pesaran,H.M., 1995. "Multivariate Rational Expectations Models and Macroeconomic Modelling: A Review and Some New Results," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 9415, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Karl Whelan, 2007. "Staggered contracts and inflation persistence : some general results," Open Access publications 10197/200, School of Economics, University College Dublin.
    2. Bakhshi, Hasan & Khan, Hashmat & Rudolf, Barbara, 2007. "The Phillips curve under state-dependent pricing," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(8), pages 2321-2345, November.
    3. Coenen, Gunter, 2007. "Inflation persistence and robust monetary policy design," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 31(1), pages 111-140, January.
    4. Sheedy, Kevin D., 2010. "Intrinsic inflation persistence," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 57(8), pages 1049-1061, November.
    5. Jeremy Rudd & Karl Whelan, 2007. "Modeling Inflation Dynamics: A Critical Review of Recent Research," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 39(s1), pages 155-170, February.
    6. Richard Mash, 2005. "Simple Pricing Rules, the Phillips Curve and the Microfoundations of Inflation Persistence," Computing in Economics and Finance 2005 427, Society for Computational Economics.
    7. Taylor, J.B., 2016. "The Staying Power of Staggered Wage and Price Setting Models in Macroeconomics," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 2009-2042, Elsevier.
    8. Bardsen, Gunnar & Eitrheim, Oyvind & Jansen, Eilev S. & Nymoen, Ragnar, 2005. "The Econometrics of Macroeconomic Modelling," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199246502, Decembrie.
    9. George Hondroyiannis & Sophia Lazaretou, 2007. "Inflation persistence during periods of structural change: an assessment using Greek data," Empirica, Springer;Austrian Institute for Economic Research;Austrian Economic Association, vol. 34(5), pages 453-475, December.
    10. Richard Mash, 2003. "New Keynesian Microfoundations Revisited: A Calvo-Taylor-Rule-of-Thumb Model and Optimal Monetary Policy Delegation," Economics Series Working Papers 174, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    11. María Dolores Gadea & Laura Mayoral, 2006. "The Persistence of Inflation in OECD Countries: A Fractionally Integrated Approach," International Journal of Central Banking, International Journal of Central Banking, vol. 2(1), March.
    12. Gunnar Bårdsen & Eilev S. Jansen & Ragnar Nymoen, 2002. "The Empirical (ir)Relevance of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve," Working Paper Series 2102, Department of Economics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
    13. Luca Fanelli, 2008. "Testing the New Keynesian Phillips Curve Through Vector Autoregressive Models: Results from the Euro Area," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 70(1), pages 53-66, February.
    14. Fanelli, Luca, 2008. "Evaluating New Keynesian Phillips Curve under VAR-Based Learning," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 2, pages 1-24.
    15. Bårdsen, Gunnar & Jansen, Eilev S. & Nymoen, Ragnar, 2003. "Testing the New Keynesian Phillips curve," Memorandum 18/2002, Oslo University, Department of Economics.
    16. Jondeau, E. & Le Bihan, H., 2001. "Testing for a Forward-Looking Phillips Curve. Additional Evidence from European and US Data," Working papers 86, Banque de France.
    17. Richard Mash, 2004. "Optimising microfoundations for observed inflation persistence," Money Macro and Finance (MMF) Research Group Conference 2003 60, Money Macro and Finance Research Group.
    18. Luca Bindelli, 2005. "Testing the New Keynesian Phillips curve: a frequency domain approach," Money Macro and Finance (MMF) Research Group Conference 2005 69, Money Macro and Finance Research Group.
    19. Karanassou, Marika & Sala, Hector & Snower, Dennis J., 2005. "A reappraisal of the inflation-unemployment tradeoff," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 21(1), pages 1-32, March.
    20. Coenen, Gunter & Wieland, Volker, 2005. "A small estimated euro area model with rational expectations and nominal rigidities," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 49(5), pages 1081-1104, July.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation

    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:ier:iecrev:v:48:y:2007:i:1:p:111-145. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Wiley-Blackwell Digital Licensing or the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deupaus.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.