On 20-21 September 2018, the Bank of Italy hosted the Seventh BI-CEPR Conference on Money, Banking and Finance, which focused on "Low inflation, low wage dynamics: implications for monetary and financial stability." The conference brought together leading economists from academia and central banks to discuss why the broad recovery in advanced economies in recent years has been accompanied by persistently weak nominal wage and price dynamics and to foster the debate on a number of related issues.
The three sessions focused on understanding whether and why the relationship between cyclical conditions, wage dynamics and inflation experienced a structural break; the extent to which such break affected monetary policy; and whether a change in the monetary policy framework is warranted given the risks to price and financial stability posed by persistently low inflation and the presence of an effective lower bound to the policy rates. Aysegul Sahin (University of Texas) and Gauti Eggertsson (Brown University) gave keynote speeches.
