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I investigate the effects of an increase in the nominal interest rate on inflation and output in the United States and Japan during the postwar period. I postulate a structural autoregressive model that allows for transitory and permanent nominal and real shocks. I find that nominal interest-rate increases that are expected to be temporary, lead, in accordance with conventional wisdom, to a temporary increase in real rates that is contractionary and deflationary. By contrast, nominal interest-rate increases that are perceived to be permanent cause a temporary decline in real rates with inflation adjusting faster than the nominal interest rate to a higher permanent level. Estimated impulse responses show that inflation reaches its long-run level within a year. Importantly, because real rates are low during the transition, the economy does not suffer an output loss. This result is relevant for the design of monetary policy in economies plagued by chronic below-target inflation, for it is consistent with the prediction that a credible announcement of a gradual return of nominal rates to normal levels can bring about a swift convergence of inflation to its target level without negative consequences for aggregate activity.

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Empirical studies using micro data find that about two thirds of all product prices do not change in a given quarter. This evidence has been interpreted as indicating the absence of price indexation. Further, models of staggered price setting without indexation interpret all price changes as optimal. However, the empirical evidence is mute with regard to whether price changes are optimal or not. To reconcile the possibility of price indexation with the micro evidence on the frequency of price changes, I modify the Calvo sticky price model by allowing each period a fraction of randomly picked prices to change optimally, another fraction of randomly picked prices to change due to indexation, and the remaining prices to be constant. The paper presents five main findings: (1) with staggered price indexation the Phillips curve includes a state variable that carries information about all past inflation rates; (2) as the degree of staggered price indexation increases, the Phillips curve becomes flatter; (3) staggered indexation dampens the short-run effect of monetary policy on inflation and amplifies its effect on output; (4) fixing the probability of a price change to 33% per quarter (in accordance with the empirical evidence), a small-scale new-Keynesian model estimated on U.S. data yields a probability of indexation of 19% per quarter (and therefore a probability of an optimal price change of 14% per quarter); and (5) according to the estimated model, staggered indexation explains more than half of the observed persistence of inflation in the United States.

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To what extent is the recent spike in inflation driven by a change in its permanent component? We estimate a semi-structural model of output, inflation, and the nominal interest rate in the United States over the period 1900-2021. The model predicts that between 2019 and 2021 the permanent component of inflation rose by 51 basis points. If instead we estimate the model using postwar data (1955--2021), the permanent component of inflation is predicted to have increased by 238 basis points. A possible interpretation of this finding is that the model estimated on the shorter sample assigns a larger increase in the permanent component of inflation because the period 1955-2021 does not contain sudden sparks in inflation like the one observed in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic but only gradual ones---the great inflation of the 70s took more than 10 years to build up. By contrast, the period 1900-1954 is plagued with sudden inflation hikes---including one around the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic---which the estimated model endogenously recalls and uses to interpret inflation around the COVID-19 episode. This result suggests that prewar data might be of use to understand recent inflation dynamics.

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A central prediction of open economy models with a pecuniary externality due to a collateral constraint is that the unregulated economy overborrows relative to what occurs under optimal policy. A maintained assumption in this literature is that households borrow directly from foreign lenders. This paper shows that if foreign lending is intermediated by domestic banks and the government has access to capital controls and interest on bank reserves, the unregulated economy underborrows. The optimal bank reserve policy is countercyclical. By increasing bank reserves during contractions, the government acts as a lender of last resort to collateral-constrained households.

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We use more than one century of Argentine and Mexican data to estimate the structural parameters of a small-open-economy real-business-cycle model driven by nonstationary productivity shocks. We find that the RBC model does a poor job at explaining business cycles in emerging countries. We then estimate an augmented model that incorporates shocks to the country premium and financial frictions. We find that the estimated financial-friction model provides a remarkably good account of business cycles in emerging markets and, importantly, assigns a negligible role to nonstationary productivity shocks.