This paper surveys and modestly extends the theory of menu-cost models of the behavior of the aggregate price level after large-cost shocks. It does so in the context of an economy with a high underlying rate of inflation. It concentrates on the effect of large permanent and unexpected increases ...

The deep and prolonged recession triggered by the global financial crisis of 2007–2009 led to a large increase in the unemployment rate in most advanced economies. Ten years later, at the time of writing this paper, the recession has long ended, and the subsequent recoveries have brought the ...

The Phillips curve—the relationship between price inflation and fluctuations in economic activity— is a central building block of economic models that allow for nominal rigidities and are relied upon by central banks around the world to gauge cyclical inflationary pressures and forecast inflation. ...

For decades, textbooks have explained inflation behavior with Friedman (1968)’s Phillips curve: the inflation rate depends on expected inflation and the deviation of unemployment from its natural rate. Yet this theory has always been controversial, and skepticism has been rampant in the decade ...

The fortunes of the Phillips curve have ebbed and flowed ever since it was proposed by Phillips (1958). Although its origins are primarily as an empirical regularity, there is now a vast literature that provides more formal justification. In recent times, the Great Moderation and the modern era ...

To gauge inflationary pressures, policymakers generally pay close attention to labor cost developments. A key reason has been the widely held view that labor cost inflation (i.e., wage inflation adjusted for productivity developments) is one of the main causes of price inflation. From a theoretical ...

In recent years, we have not seen much of a negative correlation between inflation, the time series plotted in figure 1, and measures of resource slack, based on real GDP plotted in figure 2. This flattening of the Phillips curve in many countries across the world has startled monetary policymakers. ...

Understanding the dynamics of inflation has become an important challenge for both policymakers and researchers over the past decade. Empirical models linking inflation and economic activity—versions of the so-called Phillips curve—have failed to account for the behavior of inflation in many ...

A central focus of monetary policy is the underlying rate of inflation that might be expected to prevail over a horizon of one or two years. Because inflation is estimated from noisy data, the estimation of this underlying rate of inflation, which we refer to as trend inflation, requires statistical ...

The job of central bankers is to use the monetary powers granted to them to promote price stability, sustainable growth, and a stable financial system. They do this in an environment fraught with unavoidable uncertainties. But, in conducting policy, there is one uncertainty that policymakers can and ...