Merging the purchasing power parity and the Phillips curve literatures: Regional evidence from Italy

The main purpose of this paper is to merge together two strands of the literature regarding, either directly or indirectly, inflation: the PPP and the Phillips curve ones. In order to accomplish this task, this contribution applies the tools of the Empirical Growth Literature and of Dynamic Panel Data estimation on a sample of 81 Italian provinces from the year 1986 to the year 1998, exploiting cross-sectional variation to avoid to use instruments not directly connected with the inflation generating process. This research strategy allows to conclude that inflation is characterized by a low degree of persistence and by conditional b-convergence across provinces. Its most suitable driving variable is the unemployment rate and there are long-term non neutralities at the regional level.