Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/82471 
Year of Publication: 
2000
Series/Report no.: 
Sveriges Riksbank Working Paper Series No. 107
Publisher: 
Sveriges Riksbank, Stockholm
Abstract: 
In this paper we study 2-state Markov switching VAR models of monthly unemployment and inflation for three countries: Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States. The primary purpose is to examine if periods of low inflation are associated with high or low unemployment volatility. We find that MS-VAR models seem to provide a better description of the data than single regime VARs and need fewer lags to account for serial correlation. To interpret the regimes the empirical results are compared with the predictions from a version of Rogoff's (1985) model of monetary policy. We find that both the theoretical and empirical results suggest that an increase in central bank conservativeness can be associated with either a higher or a lower variance in unemployment. In the U.S. case we find that the variance of unemployment is lower in the low inflation regime than in hte high inflation regime, while the Swedish and the U.K. cases suggest that unemployment variability is higher in the low inflation regime.
Subjects: 
Cointegration
Monetary policy
Phillips curve
Regime switching
Unemployment volatility
JEL: 
C32
E31
E52
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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