Presented by Charles I. Plosser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia> Cato Institute’s 28th Annual Monetary Conference, Washington, D.C., November 18, 2010

The subjective distribution of growth rates of aggregate consumption is characterized by pessimism if it is first-order stochastically dominated by the objective distribution. Uniform pessimism is a leftward translation of the objective distribution of the logarithm of the growth rate. The...