Technology, Utilization and Inflation: What Drives the New Keynesian Phillips Curve?

We argue that the New-Keynesian Phillips Curve literature has failed to deliver a convincing measure of real marginal costs. We start from a careful modeling of optimal price setting allowing for non-unitary factor substitution, non-neutral technical change and time-varying factor utilization rates. This ensures the resulting real marginal cost measures match volatility reductions and level changes witnessed in many US time series. The cost measure comprises conventional counter-cyclical cost elements plus pro-cyclical (and co-varying) utilization rates. Although pro-cyclical elements seem to dominate, the components of real marginal cost components are becoming less cyclical over time. Incorporating this richer driving variable produces more plausible price-stickiness estimates than otherwise and suggests a more balanced weight of backward and forward-looking inflation expectations than commonly found. Our results challenge existing views of inflation determinants and have important implications for modeling inflation in New-Keynesian models.