In recent decades, advanced economies have experienced low and stable inflation and long periods of liquidity trap. We construct an alternative business-cycle model capturing these two features by adding two assumptions to a money-in-the-utility-function model: the labor market is subject to...

Robert Solow has criticized our 2006 Journal of Economic Perspectives essay describing "Modern Macroeconomics in Practice." Solow eloquently voices the commonly heard complaint that too much macroeconomic work today starts with a model with a single type of agent. We argue that modern...

When the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates binds, monetary policy cannot provide appropriate stimulus. We show that in the standard New Keynesian model, tax policy can deliver such stimulus at no cost and in a time-consistent manner. There is no need to use inefficient policies such as...

The great contraction of 2008 pushed the U.S. economy into a protracted liquidity trap (i.e., a long period with zero nominal interest rates and inflationary expectations below target). In addition, the recovery was jobless (i.e., output growth recovered but unemployment lingered). This paper...

This paper studies optimal monetary policy under dynamic debt deleveraging once the zero bound is binding. Unlike the existing literature, the natural rate of interest is endogenous and depends on macroeconomic policy. Optimal monetary policy successfully raises the natural rate of interest by...

We explore the importance of the nature of nominal price and wage adjustment for the design of effective monetary policy strategies, especially at the zero lower bound. Our analysis suggests that sticky-price and sticky-information models fit standard macroeconomic time series comparably well....

We propose an overlapping generations New Keynesian model in which a permanent (or very persistent) slump is possible without any self-correcting force to full employment. The trigger for the slump is a deleveraging shock, which creates an oversupply of savings. Other forces that work in the...

We analyze the optimal Taylor rule in a standard New Keynesian model. If the central bank can observe the output gap and the inflation rate without error, then it is typically optimal to respond infinitely strongly to observed deviations from the central bank's targets. If it observes inflation...

The Phillips Curve (hereafter PC) is widely viewed as dead, destined to the mortuary scrapyard of discarded economic ideas. The coroner's evidence consists of the small standard deviation of the core inflation rate in the past two decades despite substantial volatility of the unemployment rate,...

We show that policy uncertainty about how the rising public debt will be stabilized empirically accounts for the lack of deflation in the US economy during the zero-lower-bound period. Announcing fiscal austerity is detrimental in the short run, but it preserves macroeconomic stability. On the...