Public sentiment says the recession isn't over. Never mind that the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the arbiter of recessions, declared that the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 officially ended in June 2009. An unrelenting pessimism constrains the recovery as consumers spend...

Unemployment has remained very high since the end of last recession, leading some economists to suggest that the underlying trend of the unemployment rate must have risen, driving unemployment permanently higher. Using a more accurate method of calculating the underlying trend, I find that the...

Recent labor markets developments, including mismatches in the skills of workers and jobs, extended unemployment benefits, and very high rates of long-term joblessness, may be impeding the return to "normal" unemployment rates of around 5%. An examination of alternative measures of labor market...

The past recession has hit the labor market especially hard, and economists are wondering whether some fundamentals of the market have changed because of that blow. Many are suggesting that the natural rate of long-term unemployment—the level of unemployment an economy can’t go below—has...

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...