Unemployment Benefits as a Substitute for a Conservative Central Banker
发现失业救济金参数与通胀呈负相关，福利国家能像任命保守央行行长一样降低通胀，基于20个OECD国家1961-1992年面板数据，效应显著且经济规模大。
In the many years since their introduction, positive theories of inflation have rarely been tested. This paper documents a negative relationship between inflation and the welfare state (proxied by the parameters of the unemployment benefit program) that is to be expected in such theories. Because unemployment benefits make the monetary authority less concerned about the plight of the unemployed, building a welfare state has a similar effect to appointing a conservative central banker. The relationship holds in a panel of 20 OECD countries over the period 1961-1992, a region where Romer finds no evidence of commitment problems. It holds controlling for country and time fixed effects, country specific time trends, other covariates, and using a decadal panel. Interpreted as causal, the estimated effect is economically large: a 1-standard deviation decrease in benefit duration is predicted to add 1.4 percentage points onto inflation, or 31% of the standard deviation in inflation. © 2004 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.