When countries are hit by supply shocks, central banks often face the dilemma of either looking through such shocks or reacting to them to ensure that inflation expectations remain anchored. In this paper, we propose a tractable framework to capture this dilemma and explore optimal policy under...

We examine the transmission of monetary policy shocks to the long-duration liabilities of households and firms using high-frequency variation in 10-year swap rates around FOMC announcements. We find that four weeks after the announcement mortgage rates move one-for-one with 10-year swap rates,...

Using randomized control trials (RCTs) applied over time in different countries, we study how the economic environment affects how agents learn from new information. We show that as inflation has recently risen in advanced economies, both households and firms have become more attentive and...

This paper proposes a non-linear New Keynesian Phillips curve (Inv-L NK Phillips Curve) to explain the surge of inflation in the 2020s. Economic slack is measured as firms' job vacancies over the number of unemployed workers. After showing empirical evidence of statistically significant...

We consider a New Keynesian model with strategic monetary and fiscal interactions. The fiscal authority maximizes social welfare. Monetary policy is delegated to a central bank with an anti-inflation bias that suffers from a lack of commitment. The impact of central bank hawkishness on debt...

This paper provides new evidence on a long-standing question asked by Shiller (1997): Why do we dislike inflation? I conducted two surveys on representative samples of the US population to elicit people's perceptions about the impacts of inflation and their reactions to it. The predominant...

This paper combines new data and a narrative approach to identify shocks to political pressure on the Federal Reserve. From archival records, I build a data set of personal interactions between U.S. Presidents and Fed officials between 1933 and 2016. Since personal interactions do not...

The deposit business differs at large versus small banks. We provide a parsimonious model and extensive empirical evidence supporting the idea that much of the variation in deposit-pricing behavior between large and small banks reflects differences in "preferences and technologies." Large banks...

We survey the growing literature emphasizing the role that supply-and-demand forces play in shaping the term structure of interest rates. Our starting point is the Vayanos and Vila (2009, 2021) model of the term structure of default-free bond yields, which we present in both discrete and...

In this essay, I analyze Salvador Allende's economic policies in Chile during the early 1970s. I argue that the explosion of inflation during his administration (above 1,500% on a six-month annualized measure) was predictable, and that the government's response to it, through massive and strict...