Discussion of “Understanding the international rise and fall of inflation since 2020”

This discussion comments on the ambitious paper, “Understanding the International Rise and Fall of Inflation Since 2020,” by Mai Chi Dao, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, Daniel Leigh, and Prachi Mishra. The strengths of the DGLM paper are manifest. There is much to learn from it, both about the commonalities of the inflation experiences of this large group of important countries and their differences, and I draw some lessons and policy implications. I will suggest that one could have learned even more if the authors had devoted some of their effort to comparing the recent global inflation episode to earlier experiences, and if they had related their empirical specification and results to predictions of models with search frictions.