This paper asks why the NAIRU rose in most OECD countries in the 1980s. I find that a central cause was the tight monetary policy used to reduce inflation. The evidence comes from a cross-country comparison: countries with larger decreases in inflation and longer disinflationary periods have...

This paper presents a model of a high-inflation economy. The model includes the government budget constraint and money demand equation of Cagan's 1956 model; an accelerationist Phillips curve that captures inflation inertia; and an aggregate-spending equation that accounts for the effects of the...

This paper investigates the determinants of the "sacrifice ratio" for disinflation: the ratio of the loss in output to the fall in trend inflation. I develop a method for estimating the sacrifice ratio in individual disinflation episodes, and apply it to 65 episodes in moderate-inflation OECD...

This paper presents a theory of the real effects of disinflation. As in New Keynesian models, price adjustment is staggered across firms, As in New Classical models, credibility is imperfect: the monetary authority may not complete a promised disinflation. The combination of imperfect...

This paper assumes that workers can move from a market with high unemployment to one with low unemployment at a cost. In principle. equilibrium mobility can be greater or less than the social optimum. For most plausible parameter values. however. mobility is too low. Intuitively. mobility has a...

This essay asks how high inflation arises and why it is costly to eliminate. Specifically, the paper discusses the roles of price rigidity and credibility problems in explaining the costs of disinflation; the puzzle of persistent inflation triggered by onetime macroeconomic shocks; and the case...

This paper determines the real effects of credible disinflation when price setting is staggered. The results are surprising: a fairly quick disinflation causes a boom. This finding suggests that nominal price rigidity alone does not explain why disinflation is costly in actual economies

This paper presents a model of monetary policy in which a rise in inflation raises uncertainty about future inflation. When inflation is low, there is a consensus that the monetary authority will try to keep it low. When inflation is high, policymakers face a dilemma: they would like to...

Why did the Federal Reserve let Lehman Brothers fail? Fed officials say they lacked the legal authority to rescue the firm, because it did not have adequate collateral to borrow the cash it needed. This paper summarizes a monograph that disputes officials' claims (Ball, 2016). These claims are...