Phillips curves are central to discussions of inflation dynamics and monetary policy. New Keynesian Phillips curves describe how past inflation, expected future inflation, and a measure of real marginal cost or an output gap drive the current inflation rate. This paper studies the (potential)...

The Great Moderation refers to the fall in U.S. output growth volatility in the mid-1980s. At the same time, the United States experienced a moderation in inflation and lower average inflation. Using annual data since 1890, we find that an earlier, 1946 moderation in output and consumption...

This paper studies the implications of internal consumption habit for propagation and monetary transmission in New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (NKDSGE) models. We use Bayesian methods to evaluate the role of internal consumption habit in NKDSGE model propagation and monetary...

This article contributes new time series for studying the U.K. economy during World War I and the interwar period. The time series are per capita hours worked and average tax rates of capital income, labor income, and consumption. Uninterrupted time series of these variables are provided for an...

Tests of the present-value model of the current account are frequently rejected by the data. Standard explanations rely on the "usual suspects" of nonseparable preferences, shocks to fiscal policy and the world real interest rate, and imperfect international capital mobility. The authors confirm...

The paper introduces the model confidence set (MCS) and applies it to the selection of forecasting models. An MCS is a set of models that is constructed so that it will contain the “best” forecasting model, given a level of confidence. Thus, an MCS is analogous to a confidence interval for a...

The United Kingdom employed the McKenna rule to conduct fiscal policy during World War I (WWI) and the interwar period. Named for Reginald McKenna, Chancellor of the Exchequer (1915–16), the McKenna rule committed the United Kingdom to a path of debt retirement, which we show was...

It is generally accepted that convergence is well established for regional Canadian per capita outputs. The authors present evidence that long-run movements are driven by two stochastic common trends in this time series. This evidence casts doubt on the convergence hypothesis for Canada. Another...

The new Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) has become central to monetary theory and policy. A seemingly benign NKPC prediction is that trend shocks dominate price level fluctuations at all forecast horizons. Since the NKPC cycle of the U.S. GDP deflator peaks at each of the last seven NBER dated...

This paper contributes to the policy evaluation literature by developing new strategies to study alternative policy rules. We compare optimal rules to simple rules within canonical monetary policy models. In our context, an optimal rule represents the solution to an intertemporal optimization...