The Great Recession had a tremendous impact on low-income Americans, in particular black and Latino Americans. The losses in terms of employment and earnings are matched only by the losses in terms of real wealth. In many ways, however, these losses are merely a continuation of trends that have...

This paper estimates a long-run demand function for M1, using U.S. data for 1959-1993. The paper interprets deviations from this long-run relation with Goldfeld=s partial adjustment model. A key innovation is the choice of the interest rate in the money demand function. Most previous work uses a...

This paper seeks to understand the behavior of Greenspan’s Federal Reserve in the late 1990s Some authors suggest that the Fed followed a simple Taylor rule while others argue that it deviated from such a rule because it recognized that the New Economy permitted an easing of policy We find...

Sticky-price models with rational expectations fail to capture the inertia in US inflation Models with backward-looking expectations capture current inflation behavior but are unlikely to fit other monetary regimes This paper seeks to overcome these problems with a near-rational model of...

NAIRU stands for the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment. It is beyond dispute that this acronym is an ugly addition to the English language. There are, however, two issues that fail to command consensus among economists, which we address in this essay. The first issue is whether the...

I find here that the early and mid-aughts (2001 to 2007) witnessed both exploding debt and a consequent 'middle-class squeeze.' Median wealth grew briskly in the late 1990s. It grew even faster in the aughts, while the inequality of net worth was up slightly. Indebtedness, which fell...

This paper examines inflation dynamics in the Unites States since 1960, with a particular focus on the Great Recession. A puzzle emerges when Phillips curves estimated over 1960- 2007 are used to predict inflation over 2008-2010: inflation should have fallen by more than it did. We resolve this...