'Inflation in the Great Recession and New Keynesian Models'

From the NY Fed's Liberty Street Economics:

Inflation in the Great Recession and New Keynesian Models, by Marco Del Negro, Marc Giannoni, Raiden Hasegawa, and Frank Schorfheide: Since the financial crisis of 2007-08 and the Great Recession, many commentators have been baffled by the “missing deflation” in the face of a large and persistent amount of slack in the economy. Some prominent academics have argued that existing models cannot properly account for the evolution of inflation during and following the crisis. For example, in his American Economic Association presidential address, Robert E. Hall called for a fundamental reconsideration of Phillips curve models and their modern incarnation—so-called dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models—in which inflation depends on a measure of slack in economic activity. The argument is that such theories should have predicted more and more disinflation as long as the unemployment rate remained above a natural rate of, say, 6 percent. Since inflation declined somewhat in 2009, and then remained positive, Hall concludes that such theories based on a concept of slack must be wrong.        

In an NBER working paper and a New York Fed staff report (forthcoming in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics), we use a standard New Keynesian DSGE model with financial frictions to explain the behavior of output and inflation since the crisis. This model was estimated using data up to 2008. We find that following the increase in financial stress in 2008, the model successfully predicts not only the sharp contraction in economic activity, but also only a modest decline in inflation. ...