Understanding Inflation Persistence : A Comparison of Different Models

This paper adopts the Impulse-Response methodology to understand inflation persistence. It has often been argued that existing models of pricing fail to explain the persistence that we observe. We adopt a common general framework which allows for an explicit modelling of the distribution of contract lengths and for different types of price setting. In particular, we find that allowing for a distribution of contract lengths can yield a more plausible explanation of inflation persistence than indexation