Estimados Académicos y Académicas FEN,

Les extendemos la invitación al seminario que organiza el Departamento de Economía, en el que se presentarán los siguientes trabajos:

1. "The Macroeconomic Consequences of Natural Rate Shocks: An Empirical Investigation"
2. "What Do Long Data Tell Us About The Inflation Hike Post COVID-19 Pandemic?"

Expone: Martín Uribe, Profesor de Economía, Universidad de Columbia.

Co-autora: Stephanie Schmitt-Gohé

Abstract 1: Much of the empirical literature on the natural rate of interest has focused on estimating its path. This paper addresses the question of how exogenous movements in the natural rate of interest affect aggregate activity and inflation in the short and long runs. To this end it proposes a semistructural model of output, inflation, and the policy interest rate inspired by the DSGE literature but with fewer identification and cross-equation restrictions. It then estimates it on U.S. data over the period 1900 to 2021. We find that a permanent decline in the natural rate of interest has a large negative effect on the trend of output and is contractionary and deflationary in the short run. When the economy is constrained by the zero lower bound (ZLB), these results are consistent with the secular stagnation hypothesis. However, we find that negative natural rate shocks depress the trend of output even when the economy is away from the ZLB. Thus, the results of this paper call for a more general theory of the trend effects of natural rate shocks.

http://www.columbia.edu/~mu2166/natural_rate/sgu_natural_rate.pdf

Abstract 2: 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.

http://www.columbia.edu/~mu2166/covid_inflation/covid_inflation.pdf

El formato será online: https://fen-uchile.zoom.us/j/9465853005.

Saludos cordiales,

Dirección de Investigación