Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/153243 
Year of Publication: 
2007
Series/Report no.: 
ECB Working Paper No. 809
Publisher: 
European Central Bank (ECB), Frankfurt a. M.
Abstract: 
Macroeconomic data suggest that the New Keynesian Phillips curve is quite flat - despite microeconomic evidence implying frequent price adjustments. While real rigidities may help to account for the conflicting evidence, we propose an alternative explanation: if price markup/cost-push shocks are persistent and negatively correlated with the labor share, the latter being a widely used measure for marginal costs, the estimated pass-through of measured marginal costs into inflation is limited, even if prices are fairly flexible. Using a standard New Keynesian model, we show that the GMM approach to the New Keynesian Phillips curve leads to inconsistent and upward biased estimates if cost-push shocks indeed are persistent. Monte Carlo experiments suggest that the bias is quite sizeable: we find average price durations estimated as high as 12 quarters, when the true value is about 2 quarters. Moreover, alternative estimators appear to be biased as well, while standard diagnostic tests fail to signal a misspecification of the model.
Subjects: 
Cost-push shocks
GMM estimation
New Keynesian Phillips curve
Price Rigidities
JEL: 
E30
C15
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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