Search results

This study aims to investigate, for the first time in the literature, the stochastic properties of the US aggregate health-care price inflation rate series, using the data on health-care inflation rates for a panel of 17 major US urban areas for the period 1966-2006.

This goal is undertaken by applying the first- and second-generation panel unit root tests and the panel stationary test developed recently by Carrion-i-Silvestre et al. (2005) that allows for endogenously determined multiple structural breaks and is flexible enough to control for the presence of cross-sectional dependence.

The empirical findings indicate that after controlling for the presence of cross-sectional dependence, finite sample bias, and asymptotic normality, the US aggregate health-care price inflation rate series can be characterized as a non-stationary process and not as a regime-wise stationary innovation process.

The research findings apply to understanding of health-care sector price escalation in US urban areas. These findings have timely implications for the understanding of the data structure and, therefore, constructs of economic models of urban health-care price inflation rates. The results confirming the presence of a unit root indicating a high degree of inflationary persistence in the health sector suggests need for further studies on health-care inflation rate persistence using the alternative measures of persistence. This study’s conclusions do not apply to non-urban areas.

The mean and variance of US urban health-care inflation rate are not constant. Therefore, insurers and policy rate setters need good understanding of the interplay of the various factors driving the explosive health-care insurance rates over the large US metropolitan landscape. The study findings have implications for health-care insurance premium rate setting, health-care inflation econometric modeling and forecasting.

Payers (private and public employers) of health-care insurance rates in US urban areas should evaluate the value of benefits received in relation to the skyrocketing rise of health-care insurance premiums.

This is the first empirical research focusing on the shape of urban health-care inflation rates in the USA.

Inflation expectations are an important part of the transmission mechanism of the inflation targeting regime. As such, central bankers must study the inflation expectations of economic agents to anchor them close to the level of the inflation target. However, economic agents are affected by the past and current macroeconomic situation when they form their expectations concerning future inflation. Using survey data on inflation expectations in Czechia, we investigate the macroeconomic determinants of Czech analysts' and managers' inflation expectations. We find that both actual and past inflation have a substantial impact on inflation expectations of the agents surveyed. We also identify backward-looking behaviour among these agents: persistence in inflation expectations of up to two quarters was detected. Moreover, financial analysts formed inflation expectations more in line with economic theory, while company managers evinced expectations similar to those of consumers.

The role of trend inflation shocks for the U.S. macroeconomic dynamics is investigated by estimating two DSGE models of the business cycle. Policymakers are assumed to be concerned with a time-varying inflation target, which is modeled as a persistent and stochastic process. The identification of trend inflation shocks (as opposed to a number of alternative innovations) is achieved by exploiting the measure of trend inflation recently proposed by Aruoba and Schorfheide (2011). Our main findings point to a substantial contribution of trend inflation shocks for the volatility of inflation and the policy rate. Such contribution is found to be time dependent and highest during the mid-1970s to mid-1980s.

There is a growing consensus that monetary policy occupies a primary position in macroeconomic management. This study aims to analyse how monetary policy performed in a sample of Caribbean countries.

The paper uses a univariate analysis on the price variables to conduct a comparative analysis on inflation and to examine the background to the relationship between mean inflation and inflation persistence.

In a descriptive statistics analysis, framed within the discretion versus rules debate, the paper argues that there is not only an association between monetary policy, inflation and economic performance but also that the institutional contexts provided varying degrees of constraints on policy.

The paper provides further confirmation that monetary policy occupies a primary position in macroeconomic management.

The role of money and monetary policy of the central bank in pursuing macroeconomic stability has significantly changed over the period since the end of World War II. Globalization, liberalization, integration, and transition processes generally shaped the crucial milestones of the macroeconomic development and substantial features of economic policy and its framework in Europe. Policy-driven changes together with variety of exogenous shocks significantly affected the key features of macroeconomic environment on the European continent that fashioned the framework and design of monetary policies.

This chapter examines the key basis of the central bank’s monetary policy on its way to pursue and preserve the internal and external stability of the purchasing power of money. Substantial elements of the monetary policy like objectives and strategies are not only generally introduced but also critically discussed according to their accuracy, suitability, and reliability in the changing macroeconomic conditions. Brief overview of the Eurozone common monetary policy milestones and the past Eastern bloc countries’ experience with a variety of exchange rate regimes provides interesting empirical evidence on origins and implications of vital changes in the monetary policy conduction in Europe and the Eurozone.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of inflation targeting on inflation for 27 countries that have adopted an inflation‐targeting regime.

The paper uses intervention analysis in Harvey's structural time series model to analyse the impact of inflation targeting on inflation, using quarterly observations. This approach provides the most useful framework for separating changes that occur to a series ordinarily over time from those happening due to exogenous events identified a priori, such as inflation targeting.

The empirical evidence suggests that almost all of the central banks that have pursued this strategy have been unsuccessful at controlling inflation, with the results indicating that the adoption of an inflation‐targeting regime has had the perverse effect on inflation for almost every country.

The implication of the finding is that central banks which have adopted an inflation‐targeting regime do not appear to have been particularly successful in reducing inflation in any significant way, as is regularly claimed in the extant literature.

The paper provides further evidence against the adoption of an inflation‐targeting regime using an unconventional approach for 27 countries that are regarded as “fully‐fledged” inflation‐targeting countries.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the deficit–inflation nexus in the two fastest growing economies, India and China, which happen to be crucial affiliates of the global growth generator countries apart from their association in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

The paper uses the prism of the vector auto regression framework, for the period 1985–1986 to 2016–2017 for both India and China. For this purpose, gross fiscal deficit, money supply, exchange rate, crude oil prices and output gap are examined as the key elements in the determination of inflation. The econometric framework used chiefly comprises of cointegration analysis, vector error correction model, Granger causality and impulse response functions.

The findings of this paper support the hypothesis that fiscal deficits are inflationary only in the Indian context and that the Ricardian equivalence cannot be negated for China at least in the short run. The results presented in the paper are a little agnostic about whether New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) explains the inflation dynamics in India, given that both inflation inertia and output gap are not robust. However, for the Chinese economy, NKPC along with structural theory is instrumental in describing trends pertaining to inflation during the period of the study.

The paper warrants broader policy framework to aim at addressing structural bottlenecks to ensure non-inflationary growth keeping in mind the structural views on inflation. Furthermore, the paper fosters greater synthesis between monetary and fiscal policies, especially considering the global economic disruptions the world economy is subject to.

Considering there are only a limited number of studies on fiscal deficit of China, the present paper is of paramount significance in terms of growing concern over the sustainability of the growth process in China. Additionally, the paper is first-of-its-kind attempt to account the effectiveness of a healthy monetary–fiscal interface in achieving macroeconomic stability in India and China.

Expectations play a crucial role in finance, macroeconomics, monetary economics, and fiscal policy. In the last decade a rapidly increasing number of laboratory experiments have been performed to study individual expectation formation, the interactions of individual forecasting rules, and the aggregate macro behavior they co-create. The aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive literature survey on laboratory experiments on expectations in macroeconomics and finance. In particular, we discuss the extent to which expectations are rational or may be described by simple forecasting heuristics, at the individual as well as the aggregate level.