Top Research Papers on Inflation

The sustained increase in oil and gasoline prices since mid-2020 has raised fears of persistently high U.S. inflation for years to come and rising inflation expectations, along with concerns about the emergence of a wage-price spiral. Using data through May 2022, we show that these concerns have been overstated. There is no evidence that gasoline price shocks have moved long-run household inflation expectations or that the inflationary effect of gasoline price shocks is persistent. The short-run effects on headline inflation are sizable, but have accounted for only a small fraction of overall ...

Counts data with excessive zeros are frequently encountered in practice. For example, the number of health services visits often includes many zeros representing the patients with no utilization during a follow-up time. A common feature of this type of data is that the count measure tends to have excessive zero beyond a common count distribution can accommodate, such as Poisson or negative binomial. Zero-inflated or hurdle models are often used to fit such data. Despite the increasing popularity of ZI and hurdle models, there is still a lack of investigation of the fundamental differences betw...

The Covid-19 Pandemic has led to changes in consumer expenditure patterns that can introduce significant bias in the measurement of inflation.I use data collected from credit and debit transactions in the US to update the official basket weights and estimate the impact on the Consumer Price Index (CPI).I find that the Covid inflation rate is higher than the official CPI in the US, for both headline and core indices.I also find similar results with Covid baskets in 10 out of 16 additional countries.The difference is significant and growing over time, as socialdistancing rules and behaviors are ...

We assess the prospects for central banks using inflation expectations as a policy tool for stabilization purposes. We review recent work on how expectations of agents are formed and how they affect their economic decisions. Empirical evidence suggests that inflation expectations of households and firms affect their actions but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear, especially for firms. Two additional limitations prevent policy-makers from being able to actively manage inflation expectations. First, available surveys of firms' expectations are systematically deficient, which can only be ad...

We review conceptual aspects of inflationary scenarios able to produce primordial black holes by amplifying the size of curvature fluctuations to the level required to trigger black hole formation. We identify general mechanisms to do so, both for single- and multiple-field inflation. In single-field inflation, the spectrum of curvature fluctuations is enhanced by pronounced gradients of background quantities controlling the cosmological dynamics, which can induce brief phases of non-slow-roll inflationary evolution. In multiple-field inflation, the amplification occurs through appropriate cou...

Abstract We investigate the flattening Phillips relation by making two departures from standard specifications. First, we measure slack using real activity variables that are bandpass filtered or year‐over‐year changes in activity (these are similar), instead of gaps. Second, we study the components of inflation instead of the standard aggregates. We find that some inflation components have strong and stable correlations with the cyclical component of real activity; these components tend to be relatively well‐measured and domestically determined. Other components, typically prices that are poo...

ABSTRACT The NANOGrav pulsar timing array experiment reported evidence for a stochastic common-spectrum process affecting pulsar timing residuals in its 12.5-yr data set, which might be interpreted as the first detection of a stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB). I examine whether the NANOGrav signal might be explained by an inflationary SGWB, focusing on the implications for the tensor spectral index nT and the tensor-to-scalar ratio r. Explaining NANOGrav while complying with upper limits on r from BICEP2/Keck Array and Planck requires $r \gtrsim {\cal O}(10^{-6})$ in conjunction ...

Consumers rely on the price changes of goods in their grocery bundles when forming expectations about aggregate inflation. We use micro data that uniquely match individual expectations, detailed information about consumption bundles, and item-level prices. The weights consumers assign to price changes depend on the frequency of purchase, rather than expenditure share, and positive price changes loom larger than negative price changes. Prices of goods offered in the same store but not purchased do not affect inflation expectations, nor do other dimensions. Our results provide empirical guidance...

Kirigami principles are exploited to design inflatables that can mimic target shapes upon pressurization and can selectively manipulate the parameters of the single units to allow the reproduction of features at different scales and ultimately enable a more accurate mimicking of the target.

Abstract Inflatable structures have become essential components in the design of soft robots and deployable systems as they enable dramatic shape change from a single pressure inlet. This simplicity, however, often brings a strict limitation: unimodal deformation upon inflation. Here, multistability is embraced to design modular, inflatable structures that can switch between distinct deformation modes as a response to a single input signal. This system comprises bistable origami modules in which pressure is used to trigger a snap‐through transition between a state of deformation characterized ...

Economy-wide emissions drop 43 to 48% below 2005 levels by 2035 with accelerated clean energy deployment.

Summary It has long been suspected, given the salience of gasoline prices, that fluctuations in gasoline prices shift households' 1‐year inflation expectations. Assessing this view empirically requires the use of dynamic structural models to quantify the cumulative effect of gasoline price shocks on household inflation expectations at each point in time. We find that, on average, gasoline price shocks account for 42% of the variation in these expectations. The cumulative increase in household inflation expectations from early 2009 to early 2013, in particular, is almost entirely explained by u...

Inspiration from origami is drawn to design rigid-walled deployable structures that are multistable and inflatable, providing a direct route for building large-scale inflatable systems that lock in place after deployment and offer a robust enclosure through their stiff faces.

It is shown that isocurvature fluctuations can mix with ζ inducing large enhancements of its amplitude, and that the large enhancements required for PBHs demand noncanonical kinetic terms in the action of the multifield system.

Global geopolitical risks have soared since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Investors, market participants, and policymakers expect that the war will exert a drag on the global economy while pushing up inflation, with a sharp increase in uncertainty and risks of severe adverse outcomes. As an example of these concerns, the April 2022 edition of the International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook contains more than 200 mentions of the word "war."

This study reviews whether oil prices (OP) in Venezuela affect inflation (INF) in the presence of geopolitical risk (GPR). The country is exceedingly dependent on oil results in geopolitical destabilization and extremely exposed to OP shocks that contribute to higher inflation. The empirical results find comovement between OP and INF in short to medium run. However, GPR explains OP in the mid-term and its effect transmit to INF in the short run. Moreover, the correlation between OP and INF is identified in the long run and more evident in the presence of GPR, suggests that OP plays a crucial r...

This study focuses on spherical caps that exhibit isochoric snapping when pressurized under volume-controlled conditions and provides the foundation for the design of an emerging class of fluidic soft devices that can convert a slow input signal into a fast output deformation.

This paper introduces a global database that contains inflation series: (i) for a wide range of inflation measures (headline, food, energy, and core consumer price inflation; producer price inflation; and gross domestic product deflator changes); (ii) at multiple frequencies (monthly, quarterly and annual) for an extended period (1970–2023); and (iii) for a large number (up to 209) of countries. As it doubles the number of observations over the next-largest publicly available sources, the database constitutes a comprehensive, single source for inflation series. It also illustrates the potentia...

It is found that, contrary to early concerns that inflation would be spurred by overheated labor markets, most of the inflation surge that began in 2021 was the result of shocks to prices given wages.

It is concluded that the news topics media report on are good predictors of both inflation and inflation expectations, and in a noisy information model, it is documented that the time series features of relevant topics help explain time-varying information rigidity among households.

Does inflation vary across the income distribution? This article reviews the growing literature on inflation inequality, describing recent advances and opportunities for further research in four areas. First, new price index theory facilitates the study of inflation inequality. Second, new data show that inflation rates decline with household income in the United States. Accurate measurement requires granular price and expenditure data because of aggregation bias. Third, new evidence quantifies the impacts of innovation and trade on inflation inequality. Contrary to common wisdom, empirical es...

In this work we introduce a new theoretical framework for Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theories of gravity, which results to particularly elegant, functionally simple and transparent gravitational equations of motion, slow-roll indices and the corresponding observational indices. The main requirement is that the Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory has to be compatible with the GW170817 event, so the gravitational wave speed c2Tis required to be c2T 1in natural units. This assumption was also made in a previous work of ours, but in this work we express all the related quantities as functions of the scalar fi...

Owing to its significant contribution to GDP and other sectors, the construction industry plays an important role in economic growth. The economy of countries depends on a number of variables in which inflation is one of them. The position of inflation in economic growth cannot be overlooked, as it is retaliating
\neither positively or negatively. This paper explores the role of inflation and how it affects the economy
\nand the construction industry. It is concluded that the inflation rate is neglected in most of the construction projects economics and budgeting that causes the projec...

We study gravitational wave production from gauge preheating in a variety of inflationary models, detailing its dependence on both the energy scale and the shape of the potential. In this work, we show that preheating into Abelian gauge fields generically leads to a large gravitational wave background that contributes significantly to the effective number of relativistic degrees of freedom in the early universe, $N_{\\text{eff}}$. We demonstrate that the efficiency of gravitational wave production is correlated with the tensor-to-scalar ratio, $\\textit{r}$. In particular, we show that efficie...

It is demonstrated that no simple general relationship exists between neutral genetic diversity and the risk of species extinction, and a better understanding of the properties of functional genetic diversity, demographic history, and ecological relationships is necessary for developing and implementing effective conservation genetic strategies.

Drawing on Italian tweets, we employ textual data and machine learning techniques to build new real-time measures of consumers’ inflation expectations. First, we select keywords to identify tweets related to prices and expectations thereof. Second, we build a set of daily measures of inflation expectations around the selected tweets, combining the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) with a dictionary-based approach, using manually labeled bi-grams and tri-grams. Finally, we show that Twitter-based indicators are highly correlated with both monthly survey-based and daily market-based inflation ex...

We study the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on Euro Area inflation and how it compares to the experiences of other countries, such as the United States, over the two-year period 2020-21. Our model-based calibration exercises deliver four key results: 1) Compositional effects – the switch from services to goods consumption – are amplified through global input-output linkages, affecting both trade and inflation. 2) Inflation can be higher under sector-specific labor shortages relative to a scenario with no such supply shocks. 3) Foreign shocks and global supply chain bottlenecks played an outsi...

We study how different forms of communication influence inflation expectations in a randomized controlled trial using nearly 20,000 US individuals. We elicit individuals’ inflation expectations and then provide eight different forms of information regarding inflation. Reading the actual Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) statement has about the same average effect on expectations as simply being told about the Federal Reserve’s inflation target. Reading news articles about the most recent FOMC meetings results in a forecast revision that is smaller by half. This exogenous variation in inflat...

In the present paper, we use the holographic approach to describe the early-time acceleration and the late-time acceleration eras of our Universe in a unified manner. Such “holographic unification” is found to have a correspondence with various higher curvature cosmological models with or without matter fields. The corresponding holographic cutoffs are determined in terms of the particle horizon and its derivatives, or the future horizon and its derivatives. As a result, the holographic energy density we propose is able to merge various cosmological epochs of the Universe from a holographic po...

Abstract LiteBIRD, the Lite (Light) satellite for the study of B-mode polarization and Inflation from cosmic background Radiation Detection, is a space mission for primordial cosmology and fundamental physics. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) selected LiteBIRD in May 2019 as a strategic large-class (L-class) mission, with an expected launch in the late 2020s using JAXA’s H3 rocket. LiteBIRD is planned to orbit the Sun–Earth Lagrangian point L2, where it will map the cosmic microwave background polarization over the entire sky for three years, with three telescopes in 15 frequency ...

We present a model of $F(R)$ gravity in the presence of a string theory\nmotivated misalignment axion like particle materialized in terms of a canonical\nscalar field minimally coupled with gravity, and we study the cosmological\nphenomenology of the model, emphasizing mainly on the late-time era. The main\nresult of the paper is that inflation and the dark energy era may be realized\nin a geometric way by an $F(R)$ gravity, while the axion is the dark matter\nconstituent of the Universe. The $F(R)$ gravity model consists of an $R^2$\nterm, which as we show dominates the evolution during the e...

Households’ and firms’ subjective inflation expectations play a central role in macroeconomic and intertemporal microeconomic models. We discuss how subjective inflation expectations are measured, the patterns they display, their determinants, and how they shape households’ and firms’ economic choices in the data and help us make sense of the observed heterogeneous reactions to business-cycle shocks and policy interventions. We conclude by highlighting the relevant open questions and why tackling them is important for academic research and policymaking.

How should policymakers respond to the recent surge in inflation? This paper examines the impact of global supply chain pressures on euro area inflation and the implications for monetary policy. Results from a Bayesian structural vector autoregressive model show that shocks to global supply chain pressures were the dominant driver of euro area inflation in 2022, and that these shocks have a highly persistent and hump-shaped impact on inflation. Furthermore, a two country New Keynesian model with international trade in intermediate goods shows that the optimal monetary policy response to global...

In the past few years, the investigation into the case of ecological footprint and its determining factors has remained the core subject of debate among policy analysts. But some of the crucial determinants of ecological footprint have not been sufficiently covered in the literature. This study employed government expenditures, inflation dynamics, and economic growth from 1971 to 2016 as moderator variables to examine the impact of alternative energy sources on Germany’s environmental quality. We applied advanced econometric methodologies for empirical analysis. The results of fully modified l...

Pneumatically inflating thin membranes of main-chain chiral nematic liquid crystalline elastomers supported by poly(dimethylsiloxane) layers are assembled into pixelated colour devices, where each individual pixel can be tuned throughout the entire visible spectrum.

Primordial black holes (PBHs) may result from high peaks in a random field of\ncosmological perturbations. In single field inflationary models, such\nperturbations can be seeded as the inflaton overshoots a small barrier on its\nway down the potential. PBHs are then produced through two distinct mechanisms,\nduring the radiation era. The first one is the familiar collapse of large\nadiabatic overdensities. The second one is the collapse induced by relic\nbubbles where the inflaton field is trapped in a false vacuum, due to large\nbackward fluctuations which prevented horizon sized regions from...

After the end of inflation, the inflaton field oscillates around a local\nminimum of its potential and decays into ordinary matter. These oscillations\ntrigger a resonant instability for cosmological perturbations with wavelengths\nthat exit the Hubble radius close to the end of inflation. In this paper, we\nstudy the formation of Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) at these enhanced scales.\nWe find that the production mechanism can be so efficient that PBHs\nsubsequently dominate the content of the universe and reheating proceeds from\ntheir evaporation. Observational constraints on the PBH abunda...

The sources and impacts of non-biological zeros in single-cell RNA-seq data differently are discussed and the importance of transparent analysis is advocated, to help address the controversy.

Primordial black holes (PBHs) generated by gravitational collapse of large\nprimordial overdensities can be a fraction of the observed dark matter. In this\npaper, we introduce a mechanism to produce a large peak in the primordial power\nspectrum (PPS) in two-field inflationary models characterized by two stages of\ninflation based on a large non-canonical kinetic coupling. This mechanism is\ngeneric to several two-field inflationary models, due to a temporary tachyonic\ninstability of the isocurvature perturbations at the transition between the two\nstages of inflation. We numerically compute...

The introduction of cross-trait assortative mating (xAM) as an alternative explanation for observed genetic correlations is introduced and results demonstrate that previous reports have likely overestimated the true genetic similarity between many phenotypes.