What explains the widespread fear of deflation? This paper reviews the history of thought, economic history, and empirical evidence on deflation, with a view to answering this question. It also outlines informally the main effects of deflation in applied monetary models. The main finding is that...

Estimating linear rational expectations models requires replacing the expectations of future, endogenous variables either with forecasts from a fully solved model, or with the instrumented actual values, or with forecast survey data. Extending the methods of McCallum (1976) and Gottfries and...

The US economy experienced a Great Moderation sometime in the mid-1980s -- a fall in the volatility of output growth -- at the same time as a fall in both the volatility of inflation and the average rate of inflation. We put this moderation in historical perspective by comparing it to the...

Dynamic Euler equations restrict multivariate forecasts. Thus a range of links between macroeconomic variables can be studied by seeing whether they hold within the multivariate predictions of professional forecasters. We illustrate this novel way of testing theory by studying the links between...

The new Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) restricts multivariate forecasts. I estimate and test it entirely within a panel of professional forecasts, thus using the time-series, cross-forecaster, and cross-horizon dimensions of the panel. Estimation uses 13,193 observations on quarterly US...

Historians have suggested there were waves of inflation or price revolutions in the UK (and earlier England) in the 13th, 16th, and 18th centuries, prior to the ongoing inflation since 1914. We study retail price inflation since 1251 and model its forecasts. The model is an AR(n) but allows for...

An SVAR in US federal spending, federal revenue, and GDP is a standard setting for the study of the impact of fiscal shocks. An appealing feature of identifying a fiscal shock with an external instrument is that one can find the effects of that shock without fully identifying the SVAR. But we...

The discrete choice to adopt a financial innovation affects a household's exposure to inflation and transactions costs. We model this adoption decision as being subject to an unobserved cost. Estimating the cost requires a dynamic structural model, to which we apply a conditional choice...

Interwar macroeconomic history is a natural place to look for evidence on the correlations between (a) deflation and depression and (b) unexpected deflation and depression. We apply time-series methods to measure unexpected deflation or inflation for 26 countries from 1922 to 1939. The results...

We provide a new way to filter US inflation into trend and cycle components, based on extracting long-run forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. We operate the Kalman filter in reverse, beginning with observed forecasts, then estimating parameters, and then extracting the...