Athanasios Orphanides and John C. Williams' excellent conference paper, “Inflation Scares and Forecast-Based Monetary Policy,” contributes importantly to the new and rapidly growing branch of the literature on bounded rationality and learning in macroeconomics. Their paper, like many others,...

The M2 money supply has grown by almost 40% since 2019. This number by itself raises the strong possibility that we have entered a new and remarkable era in United States monetary history. But what would Milton Friedman say? Drawing on Friedman’s writings and a fresh look at the data on money,...

Previous studies of disinflation work with models in which firms use time- dependent strategies, changing nominal prices at intervals of fixed length. These models may be criticized for failing to allow pricing behavior to adjust after a large shift in policy regime. Consequently, this paper...

When firms set nominal prices in advance, optimal monetary policy insulates aggregate output against shocks to demand. It can do so, however, by following the constant money growth rule advocated by Milton Friedman; it need not respond to the shocks in an actively countercyclical way. In...

More than fifty years ago, Friedman and Schwartz examined historical data for the United States and found evidence of pro-cyclical movements in the money stock, which led corresponding movements in output. We find similar correlations in more recent data; these appear most clearly when Divisia...

This paper develops an affine model of the term structure of interest rates in which bond yields are driven by observable and unobservable macroeconomic factors. It imposes restrictions to identify the effects of monetary policy and other structural disturbances on output, inflation, and...

In the 1920s, Irving Fisher extended his previous work on the Quantity Theory to describe, through an early version of the Phillips Curve, how changes in the money stock could be associated with cyclical movements in output, employment, and inflation. At the same time, Holbrook Working designed...