"Aging populations in advanced economies are placing ever-increasing demands on government spending in the form of old-age benefits. Economies that have promised substantially more benefits than they have made provision to finance are heading into a prolonged era of fiscal stress. Unresolved...

Economic theory predicts that intertemporal decisions depend critically on expectations about future outcomes. Using the universe of professional survey forecasts for the United States, we document the behavior of the entire term structure of expectations for output growth, inflation, and the...

We develop a theory of low-frequency movements in in ation expectations, and use it to interpret joint dynamics of in ation and in ation expectations for the United States and other countries over the post-war period. In our theory long-run in ation expectations are endogenous. They are driven...

We study zero interest-rate policy in response to a large negative demand shock when long-run expectations can fall over time. Because falling expectations make monetary policy less effective by raising real interest rates, the optimal forward guidance policy makes large front-loaded promises to...

This paper considers the implications of an important source of model misspecification for the design of monetary policy rules: the assumed manner of expectations formation. Following a considerable literature on learning, it is assumed that private agents seek to maximize their objectives...