To accurately forecast the future rate of inflation, it is imperative to account for inflation’s underlying trend. This is especially important for medium- to long-run forecasts. In this Commentary I demonstrate a simple but powerful technique for incorporating this trend into standard...

In the face of falling house prices, decreasing rates of homeownership, and a glut of vacant homes, the Consumer Price Index’s measure of the cost of owner-occupied housing—owners’ equivalent rent of residence (OER)—has begun to accelerate, rising at an annualized rate of 2.3 percent...

This paper extends McCallum?s (1987) nominal targeting rule to a small open economy by allowing for feedback from the exchange rate. Instead of setting parameters in a McCallum-type targeting rule and simulating, the parameters are estimated using a markov switching model. We argue that a model...

We measure the relative contribution of the deviation of real activity from its equilibrium (the gap), “supply shock” variables, and long-horizon inflation forecasts for explaining the U.S. inflation rate in the post-war period. For alternative specifications for the inflation driving...

This paper studies the Great Inflation in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Newspaper coverage and policymakers' statements are used to analyze the views on the inflation process that led to the 1970s macroeconomic policies, and the different movement in each country away from 1970s views. I...

This paper considers the Great Inflation of the 1970s in Japan and Germany. From 1975 onward, these countries had low inflation relative to other large economies. Traditionally, this success is attributed to stronger discipline on the part of Japan and Germany’s monetary authorities—for...

Recent research showing negative correlations between detrended output and prices during the postwar period has brought into question the conventional wisdom that prices are procyclical. However, this finding has been shown to be sensitive to the sample period considered. This paper examines the...

This paper investigates the relationship between money growth, inflation, and productive activity in a general equilibrium model where search frictions motivate the transactions role of money. The use of a multiple matching technique, where search frictions are captured by limited consumption...

We formulate the central bank's problem of selecting an optimal long-run inflation rate as the choice of a distorting tax by a planner who wishes to maximize discounted utility for a heterogeneous population of infinitely-lived households in an economy with constant aggregate income. Households...

This paper presents empirical evidence on the hypothesis that aggregate price disturbances cause or worsen financial distress. We construct two annual indexes of financial conditions for the United States covering 1790-1997, and estimate the effect of aggregate price shocks on each index using a...