This paper discusses the likely evolution of U.S. inflation in the near and medium term on the basis of (1) past U.S. experience with very low levels of inflation, (2) the most recent Japanese experience with deflation, and (3) recent U.S. micro evidence on downward nominal wage rigidity. Our...

This paper provides an array of empirical evidence bearing on potentially important changes in the dynamics of U.S. inflation. We examine the overall performance of Phillips curves relative to some well-known benchmarks, the efficiency with which the Federal Reserve’s Greenbook forecasts of...

Would a more open and regular evaluation of the monetary policy framework improve policy in the United States? Even when considering a relatively short timeframe that spans the 1960s to the present, it is possible to point to many significant changes to the framework. Some of the changes were...

This paper examines the concept of inflation persistence in macroeconomic theory. It begins with a definition of persistence, emphasizing the difference between reduced]form and structural persistence. It then examines a number of empirical measures of reduced]form persistence, considering the...

A growing body of literature examines alternatives to the rational expectations hypothesis in applied macroeconomics. This paper continues this strand of research by examining the role survey expectations play in the inflation process and reports three principal findings. One, short-run...

We compare estimates of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) when the curve is specified in two different ways. In the standard difference equation (DE) form, current inflation is a function of past inflation, expected future inflation, and real marginal costs. The alternative closed form...

Systematic differences in the timing of wage setting decisions among industrialized countries provide an ideal framework to study the importance of wage rigidity in the transmission of monetary policy. The Japanese Shunto presents the best-known case of bunching in wage setting decisions: From...

In their 2010 comment (which we refer to as CS10), Cogley and Sbordone argue that: (1) our estimates are not entirely closed form, and hence are arbitrary; (2) we cannot guarantee that our estimates are valid, while their estimates (Cogley and Sbordone 2008, henceforth CS08) always are; and (3)...

We illustrate the importance of placing model-consistent restrictions on expectations in the estimation of forward-looking Euler equations. In two-stage limited-information settings where first-stage estimates are used to proxy for expectations, parameter estimates can differ substantially,...

Using U.S. real-time data, we show that changes in the unemployment rate unexplained by Okun's Law have significant predictive power for GDP data revisions. A positive (negative) error in Okun's Law in real time implies that GDP will be later revised to show less (more) growth than initially...