There is, in informal discussions and even in some academic writings, a tendency to treat U.S. monetary history as divided between a gold standard past and a fiat dollar present. In truth, the legal meaning of a "standard" U.S. dollar has been contested, often hotly, throughout U.S. history, and...

Today, banks in the U.S. hold almost $20 trillion in total financial assets; ten times that held by all credit unions, but less than three times that held by the Federal Reserve. The average annual growth of financial asset holdings of credit unions (12%) has generally exceeded the average...

The following analysis presents conditions for characterizing unsustainable public borrowing. These conditions describe a “critical level” of public debt beyond which increases in taxes (current or future) are required to meet debt service obligations. The discussion is written for a general...

Despite a large literature documenting that the efficacy of monetary policy depends on how inflation expectations are anchored, many monetary policy models assume: (1) the inflation target of monetary policy is constant; and, (2) the inflation target is known by all economic agents. This paper...

We develop and estimate a general equilibrium model in which monetary policy can deviate from active in.ation stabilization and agents face uncertainty about the nature of these deviations. When observing a deviation, agents conduct Bayesian learning to infer its likely duration. Under...

Since the 2001 recession, average core inflation has been below the Federal Reserve's 2% target. This deflationary bias is a predictable consequence of a low nominal interest rates environment. When monetary policy faces the risk of encountering the zero lower bound, in.ation tends to remain...

In this paper we analyze changes in the Federal Reserve behavior and objectives since the1960s justified by potentially evolving beliefs—through a real-time learning process—aboutthe structure of the economy and shifts in policymakers' preferences in the late 1970s. In addition, we allow for...

About half of professional forecasters report that they use the natural rate of unemployment (u*) to forecast. I show that forecasters' reported use of and estimates of u* are informative about their expectations-formation process, including their use of a Phillips curve. Those who report not...

Since the 2001 recession, average core inflation has been below the Federal Reserve's 2% target. This deflationary bias is a predictable consequence of a low nominal interest rates environment. When monetary policy faces the risk of encountering the zero lower bound, in.ation tends to remain...