We estimate the natural rate of unemployment, often referred to as u*, in the United States using data on labor market flows, short-term and long-term inflation expectations and a forward-looking New-Keynesian Phillips curve for the 1960-2021 period. The natural rate of unemployment was at...

This paper considers a general class of nonlinear rational-expectations models in which policymakers seek to maximize an objective function that may be household expected utility. We show how to derive a target criterion that is: (i) consistent with the model's structural equations, (ii) strong...

This paper characterizes optimal monetary policy for a range of alternative economic models in terms of a flexible inflation targeting rule, with a target criterion that depends on the model specification. It shows which forecast horizons should matter, and which variables besides inflation...

In this paper we calculate robustly optimal monetary policy rules for several variants of a simple optimizing model of the monetary transmission mechanism with sticky prices and/or wages. We discuss representations of optimal policy both in terms of interest-rate feedback rules that generalize...

This paper proposes a general method for deriving an optimal monetary policy rule in the case of a dynamic linear rational-expectations model and a quadratic objective function for policy. A commitment to a rule of the type proposed results in a determinate equilibrium in which the responses to...

Proposals for 'inflation targeting' as a strategy for monetary policy leave open the important operational question of how to determine whether current policies are consistent with the long-run inflation target. An interesting possibility is that the central bank might target current...

In an experiment that elicits subjects' willingness to pay (WTP) for the outcome of a lottery, we confirm the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes described by Kahneman and Tversky. In addition, we document a systematic effect of stake sizes on the magnitude and sign of the relative risk premium,...

We analyze a coordination game with information-constrained players. The players' actions are based on a noisy compressed representation of the game's payoffs in a particular case, where the compressed representation is a latent state learned by a variational autoencoder (VAE). Our generalized...

This paper characterizes a robust optimal policy rule in a simple forward-looking model, when the policymaker faces uncertainty about model parameters and shock processes. We show that the robust optimal policy rule is likely to involve a stronger response of the interest rate to fluctuations in...