IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/31099.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Inflation is Conflict

Author

Listed:
  • Guido Lorenzoni
  • Iván Werning

Abstract

This paper isolates the role of conflict or disagreement on inflation in two ways. In the first part of the paper, we present a stylized model, kept purposefully away from traditional macro models. Inflation arises despite the complete absence of money, credit, interest rates, production, and employment. Inflation is due to conflict; it cannot be explained by monetary policy or departures from a natural rate of output or employment. In contrast, the second part of the paper develops a flexible framework that nests many traditional macroeconomic models. We include both goods and labor to study the interaction of price and wage inflation. Our main results provide a decomposition of inflation into “adjustment” and “conflict” inflation, highlighting the essential nature of the latter. Conflict should be viewed as the proximate cause of inflation, fed by other root causes. Our framework sits on top of a wide set of particular models that can endogenize conflict.

Suggested Citation

  • Guido Lorenzoni & Iván Werning, 2023. "Inflation is Conflict," NBER Working Papers 31099, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:31099
    Note: EFG IFM ME
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w31099.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.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Wildauer, Rafael & Kohler, Karsten & Aboobaker, Adam & Guschanski, Alexander, 2023. "Energy price shocks, conflict inflation, and income distribution in a three-sector model," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 127(PB).
    2. Hein, Eckhard, 2023. "Inflation is always and everywhere … a conflict phenomenon: Post-Keynesian inflation theory and energy price driven conflict inflation," IPE Working Papers 224/2023, Berlin School of Economics and Law, Institute for International Political Economy (IPE).
    3. Hassan Afrouzi & Saroj Bhattarai, 2023. "Inflation and GDP Dynamics in Production Networks: A Sufficient Statistics Approach," CESifo Working Paper Series 10416, CESifo.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E0 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General
    • E12 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General Aggregative Models - - - Keynes; Keynesian; Post-Keynesian; Modern Monetary Theory
    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation

    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:31099. 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.