In this paper, we quantify the changes in the relationship between international forces and many key US macroeconomic variables over the 1984-2005 period, and analyze changes in the monetary policy transmission mechanism. We do so by estimating a Factor-Augmented VAR on a large set of US and...

This paper disentangles fluctuations in disaggregated prices due to macroeconomic and sectoral conditions using a factor-augmented vector autoregression estimated on a large data set. On the basis of this estimation, we establish eight facts: (1) Macroeconomic shocks explain only about 15% of...

Standard practice for the estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models maintains the assumption that economic variables are properly measured by a single indicator, and that all relevant information for the estimation is summarized by a small number of data series. However,...

Standard practice for the estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models maintains the assumption that economic variables are properly measured by a single indicator, and that all relevant information for the estimation is summarized by a small number of data series. However,...

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...

Despite the large amount of empirical research on monetary policy rules, there is surprisingly little consensus on the nature or even the existence of changes in the conduct of U.S. monetary policy. Three issues appear central to this disagreement: 1) the specific type of changes in the policy...

This paper bridges the gap between two popular approaches to estimating the natural rate of unemployment, u*. The first approach uses detailed labor market indicators such as labor market flows, cross-sectional data on unemployment and vacancies, or various measures of demographic changes. The...

Conventional wisdom suggests that medium-term money neutrality imposes strong limitations on the effects of monetary policy. The point of this paper is that models with medium- and long-term money neutrality are prone to generate non-existence of equilibria at the effective lower bound (ELB) on...

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...

Most empirical analyses of monetary policy have been confined to frameworks in which the Federal Reserve is implicitly assumed to exploit only a limited amount of information, despite the fact that the Fed actively monitors literally thousands of economic time series. This article explores the...