Since the 1960s, several countries have adopted incomes policies in various forms to control inflation that had been interpreted as the result of a distributional struggle between business and labour unions. Recent writings on the NAIRU, however, ignore past policy interventions in the wage and...

The authors derive an estimate of the Federal Reserve's assessment of the natural rate of unemployment in real time from the Greenbook forecast of inflation. The estimated natural rate starts to rise noticeably in the second half of the mid-1970s. It stays relatively high in the 1980s, and then...