This paper argues that because United States inflation has been nonstationary over the past 5 decades the body of empirical research that proceeds assuming explicitly or implicitly that inflation is stationary with constant mean is largely invalid. Using 50 years of US inflation data the...

Phillips curves have often been estimated without due attention to the underlying time series properties of the data. In particular, the consequences of inflation having discrete breaks in mean, for example caused by supply shocks and the corresponding responses of policymakers, have not been...

Phillips curves are often estimated without due attention being paid to the underlying time series properties of the data. In particular, the consequences of inflation having discrete breaks in mean have not been studied adequately. We show by means of simulations and a detailed empirical...

‘Modern’ Phillips curve theories predict inflation is an integrated, or near integrated, process. However, inflation appears bounded above and below in developed economies and so cannot be ‘truly’ integrated and more likely stationary around a shifting mean. If agents believe inflation...

Whether or not macroeconomics is a science depends on the scientific nature of macroeconomic theories and how the discipline responds when the empirical evidence fails to match the underlying assumptions and predictions of the theories. By way of an example, four conditions for macroeconomics to...