The Great Moderation, the significant decline in the variability of economic activity, provides a most remarkable feature of the macroeconomic landscape in the last twenty years. A number of papers document the beginning of the Great Moderation in the US and the UK. In this paper, we use the...

This paper reports a two-stage analysis of inflation persistence using monthly data from 11 IT countries and, for comparison, the US, a non IT country with a history of credible monetary policy. First, we estimate inflation persistence in a rolling-window fractional integration setting using the...

We investigate the empirics of the persistence in the inflation series for 13 OECD countries that use an inflation targeting regime. We estimate persistence in the pre- and post-targeting periods using the fractional integration framework suggested by Kim and Phillips (2006, 2000) and Phillips...

A widely spread belief among economists is that monetary policy has relatively short-lived effects on real variables such as unemployment. Previous studies indicate that monetary policy affects the output gap only at business cycle frequencies, but the effects on unemployment may well be more...