Professionals' forecast of the inflation gap and its persistence

The purpose of the present paper is to investigate perceived inflation gap persistence using actual data of professional forecasts. We derive the unobserved perceived inflation gap persistence and using a state dependent model we estimate the non-linear persistence coefficient of inflation gap. Our main result is that for GDP deflator inflation, the estimates of persistence largely confirm the results obtained indirectly using a linear model. However, when we look at CPI inflation, we find that there is strong evidence for state-dependence and time variation.