Can Rational Expectations Sticky-Price Models Explain Inflation Dynamics?

摘要

In recent years, there has been a trend in macroeconomics toward analyzing business cycles and stabilization policy in the context of models that incorporate both nominal rigidities and optimizing agents with rational (i.e., model-consistent) expectations. One important way in which this "new-Keynesian" approach differs from earlier work in the Keynesian tradition involves the way in which expectations are assumed to affect price-setting behavior. In particular, rather than assuming adaptive inflation expectations on the part of wage- and price-setters, recent work draws on explicit models of price stickiness (such as that of Gulliermo A. Calvo, 1983) in order to motivate a forward-looking inflation equation (a "new-Keynesian Phillips curve") of the form π_t = βE_tπ_(t+1) + γy_t where β is a parameter close to or equal to one, and y_t is a measure of the output gap.