In his 1999 monograph The Conquest of American Inflation Tom Sargent describes how a policymaker, who applies a constant-gain algorithm in estimating the Phillips curve, can fall into the grip of an induction problem: concluding on the basis of reduced-form evidence that the trade-off between...

In the late 1960s and into the 1970s, the United States experienced a burst of inflation the origins of which seemed hard to uncover. This paper advances the idea that the Fed simply got the model wrong. We assume that the true model of the economy is a variant of the standard New Keynesian...