This paper investigates the sources of the widely noticed reduction in the volatility of American business cycles since the mid 1980s. Our analysis of reduced volatility emphasizes the sharp decline in the standard deviation of changes in real GDP, of the output gap, and of the inflation rate....

Recent cross-country studies on the globalization and output-inflation tradeoff correlation find openness has no significant effect on OECD countries. Those studies assume parameter constancy across countries. In this paper, we argue that this assumption does not hold for major industrialized...

The Friedman rule states that steady-state welfare is maximized when there is deflation at the real rate of interest. Recent work by Khan et al. (2003) uses a richer model but still finds deflation optimal. In an otherwise standard new Keynesian model we show that, if households have hyperbolic...

In this paper an expectations-augmented Phillips curve relation in an open economy is derived and estimated. As in Rotemberg´s (1982) model firms are assumed to face quadratic price adjustment costs. In addition, second-order costs of changing prices are not included. Consequently the derived...

We study optimal price setting by a monopolist in an infinite horizon model with stochastic costs, moderate inflation, and costly price adjustment. For realistic parameters, chosen to replicate observed frequencies of price changes, the model fits numerically several empirical regularities. In...

This article is related to the large recent literature on Phillips curves in sticky- price equilibrium models. It differs in allowing for the degree of price stickiness to be determined endogenously. A closed-form solution for short-term inflation is derived from the dynamic stochastic general...

This article complements the structural New-Keynesian macro framework with a no-arbitrage affine term structure model. Whereas our methodology is general, we focus on an extended macro-model with unobservable processes for the inflation target and the natural rate of output which are filtered...

An approach to decomposing and interpreting the inflation process is proposed. It suggests that the low U.S. inflation rate in recent years reflects a structural development, but that the low levels of unemployment may be a mainly cyclical phenomenon.

We set up and estimate a structural unobserved components open economy model for the rate of unemployment and the real exchange rate in Sweden. This approach enables us to simultaneously determine changes in both cyclical and equilibrium rates. Our results show that the Natural Rate/NAIRU has...

In this paper we study 2-state Markov switching VAR models of monthly unemployment and inflation for three countries: Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States. The primary purpose is to examine if periods of low inflation are associated with high or low unemployment volatility. We find that...