The authors consider inflation and government debt dynamics when monetary policy employs a global interest rate rule and private agents forecast using adaptive learning. Because of the zero lower bound on interest rates, active interest rate rules are known to imply the existence of a second,...

The authors consider inflation and government debt dynamics when monetary policy employs a global interest rate rule and private agents forecast using adaptive learning. Because of the zero lower bound on interest rates, active interest rate rules are known to imply the existence of a second,...

We formulate the central bank's problem of selecting an optimal long-run inflation rate as the choice of a distorting tax by a planner who wishes to maximize discounted utility for a heterogeneous population of infinitely-lived households in an economy with constant aggregate income. Households...

In this paper, we evaluate the accuracy of the U.S. Treasury Department forecasts of real growth and inflation from 1976 to 1990 for the Group of Seven (G-7) economies. The accuracy of these forecasts is measured against the standard of actual real world growth and inflation as subsequently...

We study the interaction of multiple large economies in dynamic stochastic general equilibrium. Each economy has a monetary policymaker that attempts to control the economy through the use of a linear nominal interest rate feedback rule. We show how the determinacy of worldwide equilibrium...

The authors study the welfare cost of inflation in a general equilibrium life-cycle model that includes households that live for many periods, production and capital, simple monetary and financial sectors, and a fairly elaborate government sector. The government’s taxation of capital income is...

In this article, James B. Bullard and Alvin L. Marty begin by summarizing some popular arguments for positive steady-state rates of inflation based on the idea that a certain amount of inflation stabilizes economic performance. Then, synthesizing a number of disparate results in a single...

The authors study the hypothesis that misperceptions of trend productivity growth during the onset of the productivity slowdown in the United States caused much of the great inflation of the 1970s. They use the general equilibrium, sticky price framework of Woodford (2002), augmented with...

The U.S. economy appears to have experienced a pronounced shift toward higher productivity over the last five years or so. We wish to understand the implications of such shifts for the structure of optimal monetary policy rules in simple dynamic economies. Accordingly, we begin with a standard...