In this paper I confess the following sin: I deliberately complicated a piece of research to advance its prospects of being published.

This paper presents evidence on the persistence of inflation in the United States over the period 1947- 2010. Of particular interest is whether the persistence of inflation has changed over that time period. We use a reduced form approach to measuring inflation persistence, modeling inflation as...

We examine the relative improvement in forecasting accuracy of the Federal Reserve (Greenbook forecasts) and private-sector forecasts (the Survey of Professional Forecasters and Blue Chip Economic Indicators) for inflation. Previous research by Romer and Romer (2000), and Sims (2002) shows that...

In this paper we jointly evaluate the Federal Reserve staff forecasts of U.S. real output growth and the inflation rate assuming the forecasts are to be used as inputs for the Taylor rule. Our simple methodology generates “policy forecast errors” which have a direct interpretation for the...

This paper investigates the change in private-sector and Federal Reserve forecasts before and after the Great Moderation. We view the Great Moderation as a natural experiment. Using forecasts produced by the Survey of Professional Forecasters and the Federal Reserve (Greenbook forecasts) we...