Modeling U . S . Inflation Dynamics : Persistence and Monetary Policy Regimes

The fact that U.S. inflation has been remarkably low and stable over the past two decades prompts questions as to whether or not inflation persistence has changed to a lower level too. This paper employs the recently developed structural stability test with multiple regime shifts to model U.S. inflation dynamics over the past half century. Our empirical results suggest that the persistence of inflation has witnessed significant declines over the most recent period of low inflation and this helps to embed a low inflation environment. The finding is robust to a variety of measures of the inflation series and offers new insight on understanding the stationarity issue of the U.S. inflation series.