A Neural Phillips Curve and a Deep Output Gap

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteur principal: Coulombe, Philippe Goulet
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2022
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author Coulombe, Philippe Goulet
author_facet Coulombe, Philippe Goulet
contents Many problems plague empirical Phillips curves (PCs). Among them is the hurdle that the two key components, inflation expectations and the output gap, are both unobserved. Traditional remedies include proxying for the absentees or extracting them via assumptions-heavy filtering procedures. I propose an alternative route: a Hemisphere Neural Network (HNN) whose architecture yields a final layer where components can be interpreted as latent states within a Neural PC. There are benefits. First, HNN conducts the supervised estimation of nonlinearities that arise when translating a high-dimensional set of observed regressors into latent states. Second, forecasts are economically interpretable. Among other findings, the contribution of real activity to inflation appears understated in traditional PCs. In contrast, HNN captures the 2021 upswing in inflation and attributes it to a large positive output gap starting from late 2020. The unique path of HNN's gap comes from dispensing with unemployment and GDP in favor of an amalgam of nonlinearly processed alternative tightness indicators.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2202_04146
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Neural Phillips Curve and a Deep Output Gap
Coulombe, Philippe Goulet
Econometrics
Applications
Machine Learning
Many problems plague empirical Phillips curves (PCs). Among them is the hurdle that the two key components, inflation expectations and the output gap, are both unobserved. Traditional remedies include proxying for the absentees or extracting them via assumptions-heavy filtering procedures. I propose an alternative route: a Hemisphere Neural Network (HNN) whose architecture yields a final layer where components can be interpreted as latent states within a Neural PC. There are benefits. First, HNN conducts the supervised estimation of nonlinearities that arise when translating a high-dimensional set of observed regressors into latent states. Second, forecasts are economically interpretable. Among other findings, the contribution of real activity to inflation appears understated in traditional PCs. In contrast, HNN captures the 2021 upswing in inflation and attributes it to a large positive output gap starting from late 2020. The unique path of HNN's gap comes from dispensing with unemployment and GDP in favor of an amalgam of nonlinearly processed alternative tightness indicators.
title A Neural Phillips Curve and a Deep Output Gap
topic Econometrics
Applications
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.04146