The relevance of supply shocks for inflation: the spanish case

The methodology applied in this article to the Spanish economy is based on Ball and Mankiw (1995). These authors assume that a good proxy for supply shocks is the third moment of the price changes distribution. The main data used are the monthly consumer price indexes of each region, disaggregated in 57 categories, for the 1993-2005 period. We estimate the relation between mean inflation and the higher moments of the distribution, including several control variables. Our results point out that Spanish regions show a common pattern with regard to nominal rigidities, and that Spanish inflation is vulnerable to supply shocks.