Using sectoral data at a medium level of aggregation, we find that price changes became less responsive to aggregate unemployment around 2009-2010. The slopes of the disaggregated Phillips curves diminished in many sectors, including housing and some services. We also document a decrease in sectoral inflation persistence, suggesting an increase in the weight of the forward-looking inflation expectation component and a decrease in the weight of the backward-looking component.

Tactons, or vibrotactile icons, have been proposed as a means to communicate complex concepts to users and to support multitasking in environments involving numerous visual and/or auditory tasks and stimuli. This study investigated the role of processing code in the interpretation of tactons while performing concurrent visual tasks in such environments. Participants decoded tactons composed of spatiotemporal patterns of vibrations – requiring spatial processing – and interpreted one of two types of visual task stimuli – requiring either spatial or categorical processing – in a driving simulation. Compared to single-task performance, there was a significantly larger dual-task performance decrement when the tacton task was paired with the visual task requiring spatial (as compared to categorical) processing. The findings are consistent with the assertion of Multiple Resource Theory that interference between concurrent tasks is greater when these tasks involve the same processing code. They illustrate how distributing task-related information across modalities is beneficial but not sufficient to avoid task interference. A direct implication of the findings is to avoid the use of spatiotemporal tactons in environments which rely heavily on spatial processing resources, such as car cockpits or flight decks.

This paper shows that a simple form of nonlinearity in the Phillips curve can explain why, following the Great Recession, inflation did not decrease as much as predicted by linear Phillips curves, a phenomenon known as the missing disinflation. We estimate a piecewise-linear specification and document that the data favor a model with two regions, with the response of inflation to an increase in unemployment slower in the region where unemployment is already high. Nonlinearities remain important, even when we account for other factors proposed in the literature, such as consumer expectations of inflation or financial frictions. However, studying a range of specifications with different measures of inflation and economic activity, we conclude that, in most cases, consumer expectations are more robust than nonlinearities. We find that the role of consumer expectations was especially important in the 1970s and '80s, during a turbulent rise in inflation followed by the Volcker disinflation; the nonlinearities make disinflation more problematic and require the inflation expectations process to be more forward-looking during this period, thereby putting a larger weight on survey expectations. We conclude that a nonlinear Phillips curve with forward-looking survey expectations can be a useful tool to understand inflation dynamics during episodes of rapid disinflation and persistent inflation.

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