Our contradiction of a widely accepted stylized fact on output behavior after
high inflation is somewhat analogous to the contradiction of a different set of
stylized facts by the countercyclical price literature (Kydland and Prescott, 1990;
Cooley and Ohanian, 1991; Backus and Kehoe, 1992; Chadha and Prasad,
1994). All of these articles refute the widely held conventional wisdom (based, as
it turns out, on samples from pre-WWII periods) that prices deviate upward
during booms and downward during recessions. These articles reach the opposite
conclusion for the post-war period, based on more complete samples of price
and output time series from the US and other OECD countries.
The increase in postcrisis growth above precrisis growth, while inflation
simply returns to or even stays above its precrisis level, is interesting in itself} 7
For one thing, it sheds light on why the growth decline associated with even
a high inflation is hard to see in the cross-section. An inflation crisis will leave its
mark on the country's 34-year average inflation rate, since post-crisis inflation
does not fall below its pre-crisis level. In contrast, the crisis-associated growth
decline will be offset by the postcrisis increase in growth, leaving little or no
mark on its 34-year average growth rate. The low growth, high inflation