Cogley and Sargent provide us with a very useful tool for empirical macroeconomics: a Gibbs sampler for the estimation of VARs with drifting coefficients and volatilities. The authors apply the tool to a VAR with three variables-inflation, unemployment, and the nominal interest rate-and two...

This paper estimates a dynamic stochastic equilibrium model in which agents use a Bayesian rule to learn about the state of monetary policy. Monetary policy follows a nominal interest rate rule that is subject to regime shifts. The following results are obtained. First, the author's policy...

Central banks pay close attention to inflation expectations. In standard models, however, inflation expectations are tied down by the assumption of rational expectations and should be of little independent interest to policy makers. In this paper, the authors relax the assumption of rational...

For a VAR with drifting coefficients and stochastic volatilities, the authors present posterior densities for several objects that are of interest for designing and evaluating monetary policy. These include measures of inflation persistence, the natural rate of unemployment, a core rate of...

Athanasios Orphanides and John C. Williams' excellent conference paper, "Inflation Scares and Forecast-Based Monetary Policy," contributes importantly to the new and rapidly growing branch of the literature on bounded rationality and learning in macroeconomics. Their paper, like many others,...

To accurately forecast the future rate of inflation, it is imperative to account for inflation’s underlying trend. This is especially important for medium- to long-run forecasts. In this Commentary I demonstrate a simple but powerful technique for incorporating this trend into standard...

This study evaluates the conventional wisdom that modern Phillips curve-based models are useful tools for forecasting inflation. These models are based on the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (the NAIRU). The study compares the accuracy, over the last 15 years, of three sets of...

It is fairly obvious that in market-based economies prices act as a constraint on individual behavior, providing a means by which goods and services flow to those most willing and able to pay for them. But prices play an additional role in the economy-that of signaling the present and expected...

This paper revisits inflation forecasting using reduced-form Phillips curve forecasts, that is, inflation forecasts that use activity and expectations variables. We propose a Phillips-curve-type model that results from averaging across different regression specifications selected from a set of...