Technology, Utilization and Inflation: What Drives the New Keynesian Phillips Curve?
Peter McAdam (pmcadamp@googlemail.com) and
Alpo Willman
No 912, School of Economics Discussion Papers from School of Economics, University of Surrey
Abstract:
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.
Keywords: Inflation; Real Marginal Costs; Production Function; Labor Share; Cyclicality; Utilization; Intensive Labor; Overtime Premia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E20 E30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2012-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)
Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.som.surrey.ac.uk/2012/DP09-12.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Technology, Utilization, and Inflation: What Drives the New Keynesian Phillips Curve? (2013) 
Journal Article: Technology, Utilization, and Inflation: What Drives the New Keynesian Phillips Curve? (2013) 
Working Paper: Technology, utilization and inflation: what drives the New Keynesian Phillips Curve? (2011) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sur:surrec:0912
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in School of Economics Discussion Papers from School of Economics, University of Surrey Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ioannis Lazopoulos (i.lazopoulos@surrey.ac.uk).