Using survey-based measures of future U.S. economic activity from the Livingston Survey and the Survey of Professional Forecasters, the authors study how changes in expectations, and their interaction with monetary policy, contribute to fluctuations in macroeconomic aggregates. They find that...

The volatility of the U.S. economy since the mid-1980s is much lower than it was during the prior 20-year period. The proximate causes of the increased stability and their relative importance remain unsettled, but the sharpness of the volatility decline and its timing has led authors such as...

This paper documents the implications of arbitrage costs on the behavior of exchange rates in an open-economy liquidity model. The main motivation behind the paper is the growing evidence that the well-documented departures from purchasing power parity are due to a failure of the law of one...

Using survey data on expectations, the authors examine whether the post-war data are consistent with theories of a self-fulfilling inflation episode during the 1970s. Among commonly cited factors, oil and fiscal shocks do not appear to have triggered an increase in expected inflation that was...

A large body of literature documents that returns from currency speculation are highly volatile and possess a predictable component, which is itself highly volatile and serially correlated. Explaining the returns from currency speculation through the presence of a risk premium has proven...

Are the recessionary consequences of oil-price shocks due to oil-price shocks themselves or to contractionary monetary policies that arise in response to inflation concerns engendered by rising oil prices? Can systematic monetary policy be used to alleviate the consequences of oil shocks on the...