Many central banks target an inflation rate near two percent. This essay argues that policymakers would do better to target four percent inflation. A four percent target would ease the constraints on monetary policy arising from the zero bound on interest rates, with the result that economic...

This paper asks how well Okun's Law fits short-run unemployment movements in the United States since 1948 and in twenty advanced economies since 1980. We find that Okun's Law is a strong and stable relationship in most countries, one that did not change substantially during the Great Recession....

From 2000 to 2003, when Ben Bernanke was a professor and then a Fed Governor, he wrote extensively about monetary policy at the zero bound on interest rates. He advocated aggressive stimulus policies, such as a money-financed tax cut and an inflation target of 3-4%. Yet, since U.S. interest...

This paper is a contribution to the analysis of optimal monetary policy. It begins with a critical assessment of the existing literature, arguing that most work is based on implausible models of inflation-output dynamics. It then suggests that this problem may be solved with some recent...

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...

This paper examines the optimal allocation of risk in an overlapping-generations economy It compares the allocation of risk the economy reaches naturally to the allocation that would be reached if generations behind a Rawlsian 'veil of ignorance' could share risk with one another through...

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...

This study constructs a new data set on unemployment rates in Latin America and the Caribbean and then explores the determinants of unemployment. We compare different countries, finding that unemployment is influenced by the size of the rural population and that the effects of government...