Patience and Inflation

Malte Hübner and Gonzague Vannoorenberghe

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Monetary policy makers constantly face an inter-temporal choice problem. By gener- ating surprise inflation they can temporarily increase employment and output. These short-run gains have however to be weighed against the long-run costs associated with higher inflation and a loss of reputation. More patient countries should therefore choose to implement lower inflation. Using cross-country data for up to 88 advanced and emerging economies, we provide empirical evidence that more patient countries had indeed lower average inflation rates over our sample period from 1961 to 2009. To address the possibility that patience may be endogenous to past inflation rates we use information on how the language spoken in a country encodes future time as an instrument for patience. Our results show that patience has a statistically and economically significant impact on inflation.

Keywords: Inflation; Patience; Stability Culture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 E31 E58 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-07-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-mac and nep-mon
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:65811

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