Inflation Persistence: Revisited

This paper presents evidence on the persistence of inflation in the United States over the period 1947- 2010. Of particular interest is whether the persistence of inflation has changed over that time period. We use a reduced form approach to measuring inflation persistence, modeling inflation as an autoregressive process. We measure persistence as the half-life of a shock to that process. Our analysis employs both a frequentist approach and a Bayesian approach to identify breaks in inflation persistence. Both our frequentist and Bayesian results indicate that inflation persistence has undergone significant changes over the past 60 years.