This note proposes a new measure of the high-frequency equilibrium interest rate, one that falls naturally out of a common textbook notion of the economy's equilibrium interest rate--and which is rooted in one particularly simple and well-known model

We look for evidence of "hysteresis" in the U.S. unemployment rate -- that is, that current labor market outcomes affect the future equilibrium level of the unemployment rate. We first examine (using a variety of econometric tests for unit roots) whether the unemployment rate tends to come back...

New Keynesian models with sticky prices and rational expectations have a difficult time explaining why reducing inflation usually requires a recession. An explanation for the costliness of reducing inflation is that inflation expectations are less than perfectly rational. To explore this...

Government capital formation raises a number of issues important to national economic well-being, yet the U.S., unlike most advanced countries, does not account for capital in its formal budget documents. We estimate depreciation of government capital using a methodology developed by Hulten and...

Since the early 1980s, the U.S. economy has changed in some important ways: inflation now rises considerably less when unemployment is low, and the volatility of output and inflation have fallen sharply. This paper examines whether changes in monetary policy can account for these changes in the...

In the second half of the 1990s, U.S. productivity growth moved up to rates not seen in several decades. In this paper, I use time-varying parameter techniques to isolate trend from cyclical movements in productivity and to obtain an estimate of the trend rate of productivity growth. I examine...

The New Keynesian sticky-price model has become increasingly popular for monetary-policy analysis. However, there have been conflicting results on the empirical performance of the model. In this paper, I attempt to reconcile these conflicting claims by examining various specifications of the...

Capture-recapture techniques are widely used to estimate the size of difficult-to-count human populations. Applications often focus on the overlap between two or more samples, but another type of data that is encountered in human studies involves only the number of times that particular...

We use simulations of the Federal Reserve's FRB/US model to examine the efficacy of a number of proposals for reducing the consequences of the zero bound on nominal interest rates. Among the proposals are: a more aggressive monetary policy; promises to make up any shortfall in monetary ease...