The strong economic ties between the GCC economies and the U.S. are manifested in three ways: currency peg, coupling of monetary policy, and the adoption of the U.S. dollar as the trading currency for oil. This paper examines how these dynamics result in a misalignment of the U.S. monetary...

Prior to 2020, the Great Recession was the most important macroeconomic shock to the United States economy in generations. Millions lost jobs and homes. At its peak, one in ten workers who wanted a job could not find one. On an annual basis, the economy contracted by more than it had since the...

We propose that the natural rate of unemployment has an active role in the business cycle, in contrast to the prevailing view that the rate is essentially constant. We demonstrate that this tendency to treat the natural rate as near-constant would explain the surprisingly low slope of the...