An examination of the impact of inflation and unemployment on poverty, using a poverty rate based on goods and services consumed, rather than on income. The findings suggest that inflation may harm the poor more than was previously thought.

An argument that attempting to alleviate the burden of unemployment on the less affluent through expansionary monetary policy may hurt the clientele it is supposed to serve if, ultimately, the policy leads to higher long-run rates of inflation.

The subject of our next article, "The Taylor Curve and the Unemployment-Inflation Tradeoff," by Satyajit Chatterjee, is finding an optimal monetary policy menu. In the past, monetary policy options were described in terms of a tradeoff between the unemployment rate and the inflation rate, the...

One of the most remarkable macroeconomic developments of the past decade has been the widespread decline in inflation despite declines in unemployment rates. For the United States, these seemingly contradictory developments have been reconciled in terms of three factors: (1) an acceleration in...

This article characterizes the change in the nature of the money growth-inflation and unemployment-inflation relationships between the first and second halves of the twentieth century. The changes are substantial, and the authors discuss some of the implications for modeling inflation dynamics,...

By most estimates, the U.S. unemployment rate is currently below its "natural rate." The implication is the economy is operating at an unsustainably high level of resource utilization. Capacity levels are being strained, tending to put upward pressure on wages and prices. In anticipation of...

The natural rate of unemployment has become an important topic recently as the Federal Reserve has raised short-term interest rates in an attempt to keep the economy from overheating. The natural rate represents the lowest possible unemployment rate that is consistent with stable inflation. As...