We test a Federal Reserve reaction function for threshold effects among the Fed's policy objectives. We find evidence that the Fed responds with greater intensity to a policy objective when that policy objective moves beyond acceptable bounds. We also find that the Fed only responds to lesser...

A number of empirical studies have failed to find a significant relationship between deficits and interest rates. This "non-finding" has become something of a stylized fact among many economists and is often cited as evidence of the validity of the Ricardian equivalence theorem. In this paper we...

Although Ricardo may be the first to give a numerical demonstration of debt neutrality, we argue that he is not the first to explore the concept. In particular, we contend that Adam Smith presents many of the same arguments as Ricardo. Moreover, Smith frames the equivalence issue in the same...

In this paper I confess the following sin: I deliberately complicated a piece of research to advance its prospects of being published.

This paper presents evidence on the persistence of inflation in the United States over the period 1947- 2010. Of particular interest is whether the persistence of inflation has changed over that time period. We use a reduced form approach to measuring inflation persistence, modeling inflation as...

We examine the relative improvement in forecasting accuracy of the Federal Reserve (Greenbook forecasts) and private-sector forecasts (the Survey of Professional Forecasters and Blue Chip Economic Indicators) for inflation. Previous research by Romer and Romer (2000), and Sims (2002) shows that...

This paper investigates the change in private-sector and Federal Reserve forecasts before and after the Great Moderation. We view the Great Moderation as a natural experiment. Using forecasts produced by the Survey of Professional Forecasters and the Federal Reserve (Greenbook forecasts) we...