Low interest rates in the United States have recently been accompanied by large fiscal stimulus. However, previous discussions of monetary policy did not anticipate this fiscal activism, leading to over-estimates of the costs of the zero lower bound and, hence, of the appropriate inflation...

Vector Autoregressions often find that inflation increases in response to a tightening in monetary policy, although standard macroeconomics predicts the opposite. This ‘price puzzle' is commonly thought to reflect interest rates being tightened in anticipation of future inflation, reflecting...

Setting interest rates higher than macroeconomic conditions would warrant due to concerns about financial instability is called ‘leaning against the wind'. Many recent papers have attempted to quantify and evaluate the effects of this policy. This paper summarises this research and applies the...

A high minimum wage (relative to average wages) raises nominal wage growth and hence inflation. This effect can be offset by extra unemployment; so the minimum wage increases the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment or NAIRU. This effect is clearly discernable and robust to variations...

We find that Okun's law provides a simple and accurate means of understanding and predicting changes in the unemployment rate in Australia. Okun's law also implies a rate of output growth consistent with stable unemployment, called the growth of potential output. Our estimates of potential...