This paper considers the evidence of “near-rationality,” as described by Akerlof, Dickens, and Perry (2000). Using detailed surveys of household inflation expectations for the United States and Sweden, we find that the data are generally unsupportive of the near-rationality hypothesis....

An analysis of how the money supply process can affect the cross-covariance structure of inflation and monetary growth, showing that the Federal Reserve's change in emphasis to monetary targeting in late 1979 could have made the apparently long lag from money growth to inflation virtually...

This paper considers the evidence of “near-rationality†in household inflation expectations, as described by Akerlof, Dickens, and Perry (2000), hereafter ADP. According to ADP, the economic incentive to anticipate inflation varies from agent to agent, and as inflation falls, some...

This paper investigates the use of trimmed-mean estimators and time-series averaging as techniques for improving the signal-to-noise ratio in high-frequency price data. We show that trimmed-mean estimators substantially increase the efficiency of the aggregate estimator compared to the more...

This paper investigates the use of trimmed means as high-frequency estimators of" inflation. The known characteristics of price change distributions, specifically the observation" that they generally exhibit high levels of kurtosis, imply that simple averages of price data are" unlikely to...

A review of the November 3, 1994 meeting of the Fourth District Economists' Roundtable, at which participants offered their economic predictions for the coming year and discussed the interactions between seasonal cycles and business cycles.

A summary of the June 12, 1992 meeting of the Fourth District Economists' Roundtable, at which 22 panelists concurred that steady and moderate growth in the economy can be expected through late 1993; includes discussions on business fixed investment, monetary growth, and business cycle theory.

A review of the developments that have led to chronic excess capacity in the U.S. motor vehicle industry, and a consideration of the prospects facing this industry in the decade ahead.

A summary of the 1994 forecasts for real output and inflation presented by 15 members of the Fourth District Economists' Roundtable at their January 1994 meeting, highlighting the measurement of service sector prices and the role of small businesses in creating jobs.