Finance and Economics Discussion Series (FEDS)
October 1999
What's Happened to the Phillips Curve?
Flint Brayton, John M. Roberts, and John C. Williams
Abstract:
The simultaneous occurrence in the second half of the 1990s of low and falling price inflation and low unemployment appears to be at odds with the properties of a standard Phillips curve. We find this result in a model in which inflation depends on the unemployment rate, past inflation, and conventional measures of price supply shocks. We show that, in such a model, long lags of past inflation are preferred to short lags, and that with long lags, the NAIRU is estimated precisely but is unstable in the 1990s. Two alternative modifications to the standard Phillips curve restore stability. One replaces the unemployment rate with capacity utilization. Although this change leads to more accurate inflation predictions in the recent period, the predictive ability of the utilization rate is not superior to that of the unemployment rate for the 1955 to 1998 sample as a whole. The second, and preferred, modification augments the standard Phillips curve to include an "error-correction" mechanism involving the markup of prices over trend unit labor costs. With the markup relatively high through much of the 1990s, this channel is estimated to have held down inflation over this period, and thus provides an explanation of the recent low inflation.
Full paper (799 KB Postscript)Keywords: Inflation, NAIRU, Phillips curve
PDF: Full Paper
Disclaimer: The economic research that is linked from this page represents the views of the authors and does not indicate concurrence either by other members of the Board's staff or by the Board of Governors. The economic research and their conclusions are often preliminary and are circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment. The Board values having a staff that conducts research on a wide range of economic topics and that explores a diverse array of perspectives on those topics. The resulting conversations in academia, the economic policy community, and the broader public are important to sharpening our collective thinking.