NAIRU stands for the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment. It is beyond dispute that this acronym is an ugly addition to the English language. There are, however, two issues that fail to command consensus among economists, which we address in this essay. The first issue is whether the...

Presented at the workshop ''The conduct of monetary policy in open economies'' on 26-27 October 2000;The decade since 1990 has been a period of innovation in monetary policy. Around the world, many countries have adopted inflation targeting as their basic policy framework. Different countries have...

This study constructs a new data set on unemployment rates in Latin America and the Caribbean and then explores the determinants of unemployment. We compare different countries, finding that unemployment is influenced by the size of the rural population and that the effects of government...

This paper examines inflation dynamics in the Unites States since 1960, with a particular focus on the Great Recession. A puzzle emerges when Phillips curves estimated over 1960- 2007 are used to predict inflation over 2008-2010: inflation should have fallen by more than it did. We resolve this...

This paper examines the predictive power of shifts in monetary policy, as measured by changes in the real federal funds rate, for output, inflation, and survey expectations of these variables. The authors find that policy shifts have larger effects on actual output than on expected output,...

The historical behavior of interest rates and growth rates in U.S. data suggests that the government can, with a high probability, run temporary budget deficits and then roll over the resulting government debt forever. The purpose of this paper is to document this finding and to examine its...

Hysteresis is central to long-run unemployment movements in many countries. This essay addresses two broad issues. The first is whether there is clear evidence of hysteresis effects. To put it differently, can we reject the hypothesis that the NAIRU, and hence the long run behavior of...