After more than two decades of price stability, the recent world-wide surge in prices for many goods and services has brought the control of inflation to the forefront of macroeconomic policy concern. Understanding the degree to which this spike in inflation is due to the economic policies enacted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, inevitable dislocation in various sectors as a result of the pandemic, loss of confidence in the Federal Reserve’s willingness to tighten policy enough to maintain price stability, or other factors is central to prospective policy design. To promote research on the causes and persistence of inflation as well as the consequences of different monetary policy responses to recent events, the NBER, with generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, will convene a conference on May 16-17, 2024, in Cambridge, MA. The conference will be organized by NBER Research Associates Laurence Ball (Johns Hopkins University) and Yuriy Gorodnichenko (University of California, Berkeley).
------------
It will bring together researchers who are studying inflation dynamics and policy interventions from a number of different perspectives, including both theoretical analysis and applied research drawing on a range of data sources.
------------
The organizers invite submissions of research papers or of short proposals of 3-5 pages that describe potential research papers that will be completed by mid-April, 2024. Preference will be given to papers that shed light on events of the last few years as well as to papers that advance our understanding of inflation dynamics more generally. A non-exhaustive list of potential topics includes: • Measuring the inflationary impact of fiscal stimulus and expansionary monetary policy during the pandemic.• Evaluating how supply shortages, for example in the market for computer chips, led to supply-demand imbalances and inflationary spikes.• Assessing the link between rising commodity prices, particularly for energy, and short-run as well as longer-run price increases across the economy.• Measuring and understanding inflation in a rapidly evolving macroeconomic environment that could include shortages of goods, a rise in the role of online markets, globalization, growing monopoly power, sharp sectoral reallocations, and other changes. • Quantifying the role of inflation expectations in generating/propagating inflation and assessing different ways of forecasting inflation.• Measuring slack in the economy and understanding how it affects inflation.• Understanding the interactions among price inflation, wage inflation, and markups. Submissions of both empirical and theoretical research, and of papers and proposals by scholars who are early in their careers, who are not NBER affiliates, and who are from under-represented groups, are welcome. Please do not submit papers that have already been accepted for publication. To be considered for the conference, submissions must be uploaded by midnight (ET) on Thursday, September 21, 2023 through the link below. Authors chosen to present papers will be notified by October 16, 2023. http://conference.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=INFs24Papers that are selected for the conference will be eligible for consideration for a special issue of the Journal of Monetary Economics, subject to editorial review and the solicitation of referee reports. The NBER will cover the cost for up to two presenters per paper to attend the meeting; other co-authors are welcome to attend at their own expense. Each team of authors will also receive a modest honorarium. Questions about this conference may be addressed to confer@nber.org.
------------
The National Bureau of Economic Research has provided financial sponsorship to make this Special Issue open access and has no influence or involvement over the review or approval of any content.
-