We explore a hypothesis about the take-off in inflation that occurred in the early 1970s. According to the expectations trap hypothesis, the Fed was pushed into producing the high inflation out of a fear of violating the public's inflation expectations. We compare this hypothesis with the...

We develop and estimate a structural model of inflation that allows for a fraction of firms that use a backward looking rule to set prices. The model nests the purely forward looking New Keynesian Phillips curve as a particular case. We use measures of arginal cost as the relevant determinant of...

Expanding on an approach suggested by Ashenfelter (1984), we extend the Phillips curve to an open economy and exploit panel data to estimate the textbook 'expectations augmented' Phillips curve with a market-based and observable measure of inflation expectations. We develop this measure using...

The `ideal' band pass filter can be used to isolate the component of a time series that lies within a particular band of frequencies. However, applying this filter requires a dataset of infinite length. In practice, some sort of approximation is needed. Using projections, we derive...

We estimate the natural rate of unemployment, often referred to as u*, in the United States using data on labor market flows, short-term and long-term inflation expectations and a forward-looking New-Keynesian Phillips curve for the 1960-2021 period. The natural rate of unemployment was at...

This paper finds strong support for a Phillips curve that becomes nonlinear when inflation is "low"--which our baseline model defines as less than 3 percent. The nonlinear curve is steep when output is above potential (slack is negative), but flat when output is below potential (slack is...

The paper specifies a disequilibrium model for the aggregate labor market consisting of demand and supply functions for labor, an adjustment equation for wages as well as for prices, a transactions equation and, finally, an equation that relates measured unemployment to vacancies and to excess...

This paper examines shifts in the output effects of unanticipated inflation in the nineteenth-century United States by estimatinga Lucas-type aggregate supply function over the 1840-1900 period. It is shown that, in contrast to the twentieth-century experience in which there has been a...

Three models of price and wage behavior are estimated and tested in this paper. Model 1 is one in which the long-run trade-off between unemployment and inflation is in terms of price levels; Model 2 is one in which the trade-off is in terms of rates of change; and Model 3 is one in which there is...

This paper examines the shift in the relation between the inflation rate and the rate of growth of real output which has occurred in the United States over the past three decades, and attempts to assess the relative importance of three possible lines of explanation: a) the new classical view of...