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Cyclical Co-movement between Output, the Price Level, and Inflation

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Abstract

Over time, there has been a dramatic change in our understanding of the relationship between the price level and output over the business cycle. For several decades, the conventional wisdom maintained that the price level are procyclical. Arguably, the biggest development in our understanding came about because Lucas (1977) offered a transformative elegant definition of the business cycle itself. Armed with the definition that business cycles are deviations in output from trend, researchers applied new econometric techniques to re-consider key business-cycle facts. In this paper, we concentrate on two related sets of business-cycle facts. More specifically, we consider the contemporaneous correlation between the price level and output and between the inflation rate and output. Of course, the relationship between the price level and inflation is tautological; the inflation rate is the time derivative of the log of the price level. The existing evidence indicates a very interesting pair of observations; namely, that the price level is countercyclical and the inflation rate procyclical.

Suggested Citation

  • Joseph Haslag & Yu-Chin Hsu, 2012. "Cyclical Co-movement between Output, the Price Level, and Inflation," Working Papers 1203, Department of Economics, University of Missouri.
    • Handle: RePEc:umc:wpaper:1203
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    Cited by:

    1. Joseph Haslag & William Brock, 2014. "On Understanding the Cyclical Behavior of the Price Level and Inflation," Working Papers 1404, Department of Economics, University of Missouri, revised 01 Jul 2014.
    2. Li, Xue & Haslag, Joseph H., 2021. "On Phase Shifts In A New Keynesian Model Economy," Macroeconomic Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 25(8), pages 2080-2101, December.
    3. Guglielmo Maria Caporale & Gloria Claudio-Quiroga & Luis Alberiko Gil-Alana, 2022. "The relationship between prices and output in the UK and the US," SN Business & Economics, Springer, vol. 2(6), pages 1-13, June.
    4. Michal Andrle & Jan Bruha & Serhat Solmaz, 2013. "Inflation and Output Comovement in the Euro Area: Love at Second Sight?," Working Papers 2013/07, Czech National Bank, Research and Statistics Department.
    5. Antonakakis, Nikolaos & Gupta, Rangan & Tiwari, Aviral K., 2017. "The time-varying correlation between output and prices in the United States over the period 1800–2014," Economic Systems, Elsevier, vol. 41(1), pages 98-108.
    6. Brock, William A. & Haslag, Joseph H., 2016. "A tale of two correlations: Evidence and theory regarding the phase shift between the price level and output," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 67(C), pages 40-57.
    7. Ndou, Eliphas & Gumata, Nombulelo, 2024. "Should the South African Reserve Bank lower the inflation target band? Insights from the GDP-inflation nexus," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 46(3), pages 638-654.

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    JEL classification:

    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
    • E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles

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