Presented at the Bowling Green Area Chamber of Commerce. February 24, 2011.

DSGE models are a prominent tool for forecasting at central banks and the competitive forecasting performance of these models relative to alternatives--including official forecasts--has been documented. When evaluating DSGE models on an absolute basis, however, we find that the benchmark...

Presented at the 2011 European Banking & Financial Forum, Prague, Czech Republic.

May 18, 2011. Delivered at Money Marketeers of New York University, New York, N.Y.

In this paper we estimate the value of the embedded option in U.S. Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS). The option value exhibits significant time variation that is correlated with periods of deflationary expectations. We use our estimated option values to construct an embedded option...

This paper examines a number of alternative PCE price inflation measures including overall PCE inflation, PCE inflation excluding food and energy, trimmed mean PCE inflation, component-smoothed inflation, variance-weighted inflation, inflation with weights based on disaggregated regressions, and...

Firmly-anchored inflation expectations are widely viewed as playing a central role in the successful conduct of monetary policy. This paper presents estimates of trend inflation, based on information contained in survey expectations, the term structure of interest rates, and realized inflation...

This paper studies the implications of inflation persistence (generated by backward-looking price setters) for monetary policy in a New Keynesian "input-output" model--a model with sticky prices in both intermediate and final goods sectors. Optimal policy under commitment depends on the degree...

We consider what, if any, relationship there is between monetary aggregates and inflation, and whether there is any substantial reason for modifying the current mainstream mode of policy analysis, which frequently does not consider monetary aggregates at all. We begin by considering the body of...