The Dominant Role of Expectations and Broad-Based Supply Shocks in Driving Inflation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The object of this paper is to assess the role of supply shocks, labour market tightness and expectation formation in explaining bouts of inflation.We begin by showing that a quasi-flat Phillips curve, which was popular prior to the pandemic, still fits the post-2020 US data well and that changes in short term inflation expectations induced by supply shocks likely played a major role in the recent inflation episode.We then document features of the joint dynamics of inflation and inflation expectations.Given the difficulty of reproducing these dynamics under rational expectations, we propose and evaluate a model with imperfect information and bounded rationality.In our model, agents see sectoral inflations as being driven by a component common to all the sectors of the economy and by sector-specific shocks.When supply shocks affect many sectors (what we refer to as a broad-based supply shock), agents infer that the common component of inflation has increased, which drive persistent inflation dynamics through their effect of expectations.We show that departure from full rationality is minor, but that it is enough for broad-based supply shocks to be amplified and propagated over time in a manner needed to explain the data.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".