Using data on developing economies, we estimate a flexible semiparametric panel data model that incorporates potentially nonlinear effects of inflation on economic growth. We find that inflation is associated with significantly lower growth only after it reaches about 12 percent, which is notably lower than the comparable estimate obtained from a threshold model. Our results also suggest that models with restrictive functional form assumptions tend to underestimate marginal effects of inflation on economic growth. We also document significant variation in the effect of inflation on growth across countries and over time.

Using data on developing economies, we estimate a flexible semiparametric panel data model that incorporates potentially nonlinear effects of inflation on economic growth. We find that inflation is associated with significantly lower growth only after it reaches about 12 percent, which is notably lower than the comparable estimate obtained from a threshold model. Our results also suggest that models with restrictive functional form assumptions tend to underestimate marginal effects of inflation on economic growth. We also document significant variation in the effect of inflation on growth across countries and over time.

This paper explores the empirical relationship between government debt and future macroeconomic activity using data on twenty advanced economies throughout the postwar era. We use robust inference techniques to deal with the bias arising from the persistent nature of debt to GDP ratio as an endogenous predictor of GDP growth. Our results show that statistical significance of the coefficient on the debt ratio in predictive regressions changes considerably with the use of robust inference techniques. For countries with relatively low average debt ratios we find a negative threshold effect as their debt ratios increase toward moderate levels. For countries with chronically high debt ratios, GDP growth slows as relative government debt increases, but we find no significant threshold effect.

Using post-war data on advanced economies, we find that a higher public debt ratio predicts marginally slower GDP growth under the assumption of a linear relationship. This result is robust to strong persistence in debt ratio, which may cause finite sample bias in estimation and inference. In the nonlinear framework, we find only weak support for piece-wise linear models that explicitly incorporate the idea of a debt

This paper investigates the relationship between relative price variability (RPV) and inflation using monthly micro price data for 128 goods in 13 Turkish regions/cities for the period 1994-2010. The unique feature of this data set is the inclusion of annual inflation rates ranging between 0 % and 90 %.Nonparametric estimations show that there is a hump-shaped relationship between RPV and inflation, where the maximum RPV is achieved when annual inflation is approximately 20 %. It is shown that this result is consistent with a region-or city-level homogenous menu cost model featuring Calvo pricing with an endogenous contract structure and non-zero steady-state inflation.JEL Classification: E31, E52