What’s Up with the Phillips Curve?
U.S. inflation used to rise during economic booms, as businesses charged higher prices to cope with increases in wages and other costs. When the economy cooled and joblessness rose, inflation declined. This pattern changed around 1990. Since then, U.S. inflation has been remarkably stable, even though economic activity and unemployment have continued to fluctuate. For example, during the Great Recession unemployment reached 10 percent, but inflation barely dipped below 1 percent. More recently, even with unemployment as low as 3.5 percent, inflation remained stuck under 2 percent. What explains the emergence of this disconnect between inflation and unemployment? This is the question we address in “What’s Up with the Phillips Curve?,” published recently in Brookings Papers on Economic Activity.
Online Estimation of DSGE Models
Our macroeconomists explain their approach for parallel and “online” estimation of DSGE models using sequential Monte Carlo techniques and share a GitHub link for obtaining their SMC Julia code.
Forecasts of the Lost Recovery
The years following the Great Recession were challenging for forecasters for a variety of reasons, including an unprecedented policy environment. This post, based on our recently released working paper, documents the real-time forecasting performance of the New York Fed dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model in the wake of the Great Recession. We show that the model’s predictive accuracy was on par with that of private forecasters and proved to be quite a bit better, at least in terms of GDP growth, than that of the median forecasts from the Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) Summary of Economic Projections (SEP).
An Assessment of the FRBNY DSGE Model’s Real‑Time Forecasts, 2010‑13
The previous post in this series showed how the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s DSGE model can be used to provide an interpretation of the Great Recession and the slow recovery.
Forecasting with the FRBNY DSGE Model
The term DSGE, which stands for dynamic stochastic general equilibrium, encompasses a very broad class of macro models, from the standard real business cycle (RBC) model of Nobel prizewinners Kydland and Prescott to New Keynesian monetary models like the one of Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Evans.
Why Didn’t Inflation Collapse in the Great Recession?
GDP contracted 4 percent from 2008:Q2 to 2009:Q2, and the unemployment rate peaked at 10 percent in October 2010.
Inflation in the Great Recession and New Keynesian Models
Since the financial crisis of 2007-08 and the Great Recession, many commentators have been baffled by the “missing deflation” in the face of a large and persistent amount of slack in the economy.
Forecasting the Great Recession: DSGE vs. Blue Chip
Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models have been trashed, bashed, and abused during the Great Recession and after.