This paper assumes that a central bank commits itself to maintaining an inflation target and then asks what measure of the inflation rate the central bank should use if it wants to maximize economic stability. The paper first formalizes this problem and examines its microeconomic foundations. It...

This paper examines the optimal response of monetary and fiscal policy to a decline in aggregate demand. The theoretical framework is a two-period general equilibrium model in which prices are sticky in the short run and flexible in the long run. Policy is evaluated by how well it raises the...

This paper develops and analyzes a general-equilibrium model with sticky information. The only rigidity in goods, labor, and financial markets is that agents are inattentive, sporadically updating their information sets, when setting prices, wages, and consumption. After presenting the...

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This paper analyzes the effects of government debt and income taxes on consumption and saving in a world of infinitely lived house- holds having uncertain and heterogeneous incomes. The special structure of the model allows exact aggregation across households despite incomplete markets. The...

We examineways in which economists can communicate more effectively to policymakers and the broader public about offshoring and international trade.

Analyzing 50 years of inflation expectations data from several sources, we document substantial disagreement among both consumers and professional economists about expected future inflation. Moreover, this disagreement shows substantial variation through time, moving with inflation, the absolute...

These two volumes bring together a set of important essays that represent a "new Keynesian" perspective in economics today. This recent work shows how the Keynesian approach to economic fluctuations can be supported by rigorous microeconomic models of economic behavior. The essays are grouped in...