This paper estimates two optimization-based sticky-price New Keynesian models and assesses how well they describe U.S. output, inflation, and interest rate dynamics. We consider models in which either internal habit formation influence consumption behavior, and in which Calvo-pricing and...

Long-run cross-country price data exhibit a puzzle. Today, richer countries exhibit higher price levels than poorer countries, a stylized fact usually attributed to the “Balassa-Samuelson” effect. But looking back fifty years, or more, this effect virtually disappears from the data. What is...

We examine the performance and robustness of monetary policy rules when the central bank and the public have imperfect knowledge of the economy and continuously update their estimates of model parameters. We find that versions of the Taylor rule calibrated to perform well under rational...

We estimate a model with latent factors that summarize the yield curve (namely, level, slope, and curvature) as well as observable macroeconomic variables (real activity, inflation, and the stance of monetary policy). Our goal is to provide a characterization of the dynamic interactions between...

Hedonic techniques were developed to control for quality differences across goods and over time in order to construct constant-quality aggregate price measures. When the available data are a panel of high-frequency data on models whose characteristics are constant over time, matched-model price...

This paper clarifies one of the puzzling results of the economic growth literature: the impact of military expenditure is frequently found to be non-significant or negative, yet most countries spend a large fraction of their GDP on defense and the military. We start by empirical evaluation of...

The literature on robust monetary policy rules has largely focused on the case in which the policymaker has a single reference model while the true economy lies within a specified neighborhood of the reference model. In this paper, we show that such rules may perform very poorly in the more...

This paper develops and estimates a macro-finance model that combines a canonical affine no-arbitrage finance specification of the term structure with standard macroeconomic aggregate relationships for output and inflation. From this new empirical formulation, we obtain several important...

This paper presents techniques to solve for optimal simple monetary policy rules in rational expectations models, assuming discretion. The techniques described are notable for the flexibility they provide over the structure of the policy rule being solved for. Specifically, not all state...

This paper studies robust control problems when policy is set with commitment. One contribution of the paper is to articulate an approximating equilibrium that differs importantly from that developed in Hansen and Sargent (2003). The paper illustrates how the proposed approximating equilibrium...