Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/153285 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2008
Series/Report no.: 
ECB Working Paper No. 851
Publisher: 
European Central Bank (ECB), Frankfurt a. M.
Abstract: 
Under inflation targeting inflation exhibits negative serial correlation in the United Kingdom, and little or no persistence in Canada, Sweden and New Zealand, and estimates of the indexation parameter in hybrid New Keynesian Phillips curves are either equal to zero, or very low, in all countries. Analogous results hold for the Euro area–and for France, Germany, and Italy–under European Monetary Union; for Switzerland under the new monetary regime; and for the United States, the United Kingdom and Sweden under the Gold Standard: under stable monetary regimes with clearly defined nominal anchors, inflation appears to be (nearly) purely forward-looking, so that no mechanism introducing backward-looking components is necessary to fit the data. These results question the notion that the intrinsic inflation persistence found in post-WWII U.S. data–captured, in hybrid New Keynesian Phillips curves, by a significant extent of backward-looking indexation–is structural in the sense of Lucas (1976), and suggest that building inflation persistence into macroeconomic models as a structural feature is potentially misleading.
Subjects: 
European Monetary Union
Gold Standard
inflation
inflation targeting
Lucas Critique
Markov chain Monte Carlo
median-unbiased estimation
JEL: 
E31
E42
E47
E52
E58
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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