Will the (German) NAIRU Please Stand Up?

This paper deals with a critical assessment of the‘non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment’ (NAIRU) for Germany. There are quite a few obstacles to perceiving the NAIRU as an easy-to-use analytical instrument: the possibility of a non-vertical Phillips curve, the occurrence of shocks and hysteresis effects, and the (mis-)measurement of important variables, cointegration issues and a time variability of the NAIRU. A new attempt is made to estimate a NAIRU for Germany using direct measures of inflationary expectations. However, by any method, the NAIRU is very hard to determine and subject to considerable arbitrariness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]