In the 21st century, many key macroeconomic variables in the developed world have been persistently low, including inflation, output, growth, interest rates (both real and nominal), and labor share. I consider a class of standard representative agent rational expectations models in which...

In the wake of the Lucas Critique, the study of appropriate macroeconomic policy has largely focused on the comparison of different regimes/rules. In practice, few policymakers are faced with making those kinds of choices. In this paper, I examine the problem of a policymaker making but one in a...

This paper has two parts. In the first part, I demonstrate that, in the absence of price and wage bounds, monetary models do not have current equilibria - and so lack predictive content - for a wide range of possible policy rules and/or beliefs about future equilibrium outcomes. This...

A large body of recent empirical work on inflation dynamics documents that current real variables (like unemployment or output gaps) have little explanatory power for future inflation. Motivated by these findings, I explore the properties of a wide class of models in which inflation expectations...