In response to the pandemic, which unfurled starting in March 2020 and raised unemployment dramatically, the FOMC adopted a highly expansionary monetary policy. The policy restored the activist policy of aggregate demand management that had characterized the 1970s. It did so in two respects....

The authors study the hypothesis that misperceptions of trend productivity growth during the onset of the productivity slowdown in the United States caused much of the great inflation of the 1970s. They use the general equilibrium, sticky price framework of Woodford (2002), augmented with...

We investigate the effectiveness of an aggressive anti-inflation monetary policy on the ability of agents to achieve rational expectations equilibrium (REE) forecasts of inflation. An aggressive anti-inflation policy includes a willingness to respond more forcefully to deviations from an...

This paper investigates the effect of an aggressive price stabilizing monetary policy on the ability of agents to reach a rational expectations equilibrium (REE) for inflation and output. We provide a more robust policy implication than the one suggested by Bullard and Mitra (2002a,b). Using an...

Using randomized control trials (RCTs) applied over time in different countries, we study whether the economic environment affects how agents learn from new information. We show that as inflation rose in advanced economies, both households and firms became more attentive and informed about...

We develop a theoretical framework for studying the effects of interaction on the quaJity of decision-making by monetary policy committees. We show that interaction, i.e. increasing one's expertise through an exchange of views, is most likely not to result in interdependent voting...

Rational expectations has been the dominant way to model expectations, but the literature has quickly moved to a more realistic assumption of boundedly rational learning where agents are assumed to use only a limited set of information to form their expectations. A standard assumption is that...