Franck Portier

@fpj-portier.bsky.social

Macroeconomist, University College London.

Lesson for monetary policy: raising interest rates to reduce labour market tightness is ineffective. One would have needed to curb down inflation expectations. Communication may be key (nothing in the paper on this). Thanks for your time. 9/9

With a bit of deviation from full knowledge of the true model of the economy, this generates persistent quasi self-fulfilling inflation episodes. A full model is estimated and shows the dominant role of broad-based supply shock in the recent period. 8/9

Confronted with an increase in many prices, agents put more weight on inflation being high, and revise accordingly their expectations Expectations then feed back into actual inflation. 7/9

Here is our conjecture: agents form expectations by trying to extract a common component from disaggregated price data. Let’s assume that there are broad-based supply shocks increasing many (but not all) prices. 6/9

We then show that given flatness and non persistent supply shocks, a Rat. Exp. model of the Phillips Curve cannot account for the recent inflationary episode. So it seems we need to rethink our modelling of inflation expectations. 5/9

(c) Inflation expectations (one-year ahead), as measured from the Michigan Survey of Consumers, are persistent and account for most of the recent inflation episode. We confirm these results using some less structural VAR analysis. 4/9

Take a New-Keynesian Phillips curve as a measurement tool: we observe that: (a) the Phillips curve is (very) flat and hasn’t steepened: output gaps cannot account for the recent bout of inflation. 2/9

A thread on our recent cepr/nber paper « The Dominant Role of Expectations and Broad-Based Supply Shocks in Driving Inflation »  with Paul Beaudry and Sev Hou. We aim at explaining US inflation dynamics in general and more specifically after 2020. #Econtwitter 1/9

#EconSky 📉📈 Great virtual issue of the EJ that collects best recent papers published in the EJ on income and wealth distribution. Foreword by F. Lippi and F. Portier. All articles in this virtual issue will be Free-to View for a limited time only, until May 2024. Don’t miss it! 👉 bit.ly/3Rk5cQj

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In his jmp, Guglielmo studies returns to vocational education in England. Exploiting variation in distance to the nearest vocational/academic provider, he measures causal returns to vocational educ. for students at the margin with academic educ./at the margin with quitting educ.

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In his jmp, Andrea explores teachers’ instructional decisions and their implications for the distribution of student achievement. He uses unique data from US elementary schools and estimates an equilibrium model of teacher instructional choices, student effort and achievement.

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In her jmp, Morgane studies the impact of work-from-home on households' consumption, wealth and housing decisions, both in the short and long-run. She uses detailed UK property-level housing data and a heterogeneous agent model with endogenous housing tenure and city geography.

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In his jmp, Jon studies whether unemployment insurance should vary over the business cycle. He derives sufficient statistics formulae and quantifies main forces at play exploiting the large variation in unemployment rate over time and across regions in Spain btw 2005 and 2017.

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In his jmp, Lorenzo studies a large place-based industrial policy aimed at establishing industrial clusters in Italy in the 60-70s. Results shows agglomeration of workers/firms in targeted areas persisted well after its termination, with spillover from manufacturing to services.

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In his jmp, Wenhao uses data and model of altruism within networks to study the evolution of patrilineal kinship in facilitating male marriages in 19th-century China amid development spurred by a forced port opening.

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In his jmp, Nick establishes a relationship between individuals’ beliefs for what type of political system should govern their country and extreme weather events, such as droughts. In the context of sub-Saharan Africa, he uses Afrobarometer and granular weather data.

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Please allow me to take a few minutes of your time to introduce the UCL economists that will be on the market this year. You won’t regret taking a close look at their application to your institution. Here they are, in alphabetic order.

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