Aggregate shocks that move output and inflation in opposite directions create a tradeoff between output and inflation variability, forcing central bankers to make a choice. Differences in the degree of accommodation of shocks lead to disparate variability outcomes, revealing national central...

For the period 1860 to 1939, the simple correlation of the U.S. commercial paper rate with the contemporaneous inflation rate is -.17. The corresponding correlation for the period 1950 to 1979 is .71. Inflation evolved from essentially a white noise process in the pre-World War I years to a...

This paper investigates the use of trimmed means as high-frequency estimators of" inflation. The known characteristics of price change distributions, specifically the observation" that they generally exhibit high levels of kurtosis, imply that simple averages of price data are" unlikely to...

As inflation approaches zero, it becomes increasingly important to examine the price indices on which monetary policy is based. The most popularly used aggregate price statistic in the U.S. is the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a statistic that appears to be a focal point in monetary policy...

The Euler equations derived from a broad range of intertemporal asset pricing models, together with the first two unconditional moments of asset returns, imply a lower bound on the volatility of the intertemporal marginal rate of substitution. We develop and implement statistical tests of these...

Large long-run swings in the United States stock market over the past century correspond to swings in estimates of fundamental values calculated by using a long moving average of past dividend growth to forecast future growth rates. Such a procedure would have been reasonable if investors were...