A diverse group of economists and policymakers gathered in Woodstock, Vermont, in October 1999 to discuss the conduct of monetary policy in a low-inflation environment. The conference was held at a time when many countries had successfully reduced their inflation rates to the low single digits,...

This paper discusses a rigorous empirical standard for monetary policy models. The motivation for this discussion is that, if one wishes to conduct welfare analysis , one must be reasonably confident that the model provides a good approximation to underlying consumer and firm behavior over the...

This paper compares different methods for estimating forward-looking output and inflation Euler equations and shows that weak identification can be an issue in conventional GMM estimation. The authors propose a GMM procedure that imposes the dynamic constraints implied by the forward-looking...

The seminal work of Phelps, Taylor, and Calvo developed forward-looking models of price determination that imparted inertia to the price level. These models incorporate expectations of future prices and excess demand by imposing constraints (typically lag-lead symmetry constraints) that force...

The Beveridge curve -- the scatter plot of unemployment rates versus vacancy rates -- has recently shifted inward dramatically. While the Beveridge curve is often used to summarize the state of the labor market, it is not a structural economic relationship. Thus, in order to understand the labor...