EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Monetary Policy Under Okun’s Hypothesis

Felipe Alves and Giovanni Violante

No 33488, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The current monetary policy framework of the Fed intends to be more ’inclusive’ by running the economy hot for longer during expansions. The logic of this strategy rests on Okun’s (1973) hypothesis that sustaining a ‘high-pressure economy’ persistently improves labor market outcomes of low-wage workers. To evaluate this conjecture, we develop a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian framework with a three-state frictional model of the labor market where low-skilled workers are more exposed to the business cycle and recessions have a long-lasting effect on their labor force participation and earnings, in line with the evidence. Under a canonical Inflation Targeting rule, the ZLB generates a deflationary bias and severely amplifies the persistent scars of recessions at the bottom of the wage distribution. The Lower-for-Longer strategy is an effective antidote to the ZLB-driven hysteresis and leads to notable earnings gains for low-wage workers and a reduction to overall earnings inequality. If pursued aggressively, however, the policy reverts the inflation bias from negative to positive. Since policymakers might prioritize differently inflation relative to inclusion, we conclude by quantifying the inflation-inclusion trade-off implied by various monetary policy rules.

JEL-codes: E10 E30 E5 J63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-inv, nep-lab, nep-mac and nep-mon
Note: EFG
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33488.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
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:nbr:nberwo:33488

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33488
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33488