Wisconsin School of Business, Madison, Wis., June 6, 2008

St. Louis Fed President James Bullard evaluated FOMC forecasts for 2014 and discussed implications for monetary policy in 2015. During an event in Chicago, he noted that the FOMC has been surprised in the same way two years in a row regarding its forecasts. He said that the nature of the...

We use cross-country data and instrumental variables widely used in the literature to show that (i) institutions (such as property rights and the rule of law) do not explain industrialization and (ii) agrarian countries and industrial countries have entirely different determinants for income...

We construct a model in which all consolidated government debt is used in transactions, with money being more widely acceptable. When asset market constraints bind, the model can deliver low real interest rates and positive rates of inflation at the zero lower bound. Optimal monetary policy in...

Consider the following facts. In 1950, the richest countries attained an average of 8 years of schooling whereas the poorest countries 1.3 years, a large 6-fold difference. By 2005, the difference in schooling declined to 2-fold because schooling increased faster in poor than in rich countries....

This article develops time-series models to represent three alternative, potential monetary policy regimes as monetary policy returns to normal. The first regime is a return to the high and volatile inflation rate of the 1970s. The second regime, the one that most Federal Reserve officials and...

We estimate location values for single family houses by local polynomial regressions (LPR), a semi-parametric procedure, using a standard housing price and characteristics dataset. As a logical extension of the LPR method, we interpolate land values for every property in every year and validate...

June 10, 2013. Presentation. "The U.S. Economy and Monetary Policy." 19th Conference of Montreal—Entering the Next Economy: New Realities, New Frontiers, Montreal, Canada.

February 24, 2012. "Comments on 'Housing, Monetary Policy, and the Recovery' by Michael Feroli, Ethan Harris, Amir Sufi, and Kenneth West." Given at the 2012 U.S. Monetary Policy Forum, Initiative on Global Markets, University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

We develop a model in which innovations in an economy's growth potential are an important driving force of the business cycle. The frame- work shares the emphasis of the recent “new shock” literature on revisions of beliefs about the future as a source of fluctuations, but differs by tieing...