Economists often describe nominal exchange rates as forward-looking, so that they reflect discounted, expected, future fundamentals. This study applies a method for identifying the discount rate involved, without knowing or measuring fundamentals. Identification arises from assumptions on the...

The gold-exchange standard in India 1893-1913 was characterized by a narrow target zone for the exchange rate, a wide annual range for the international interest-rate differential, and negative (seasonal) autocorrelation in interest rates. These properties are consistent with a standard...

The all-gap Phillips curve (PC) explains inflation by expected inflation and an activity variable such as output or the unemployment rate, but with both inflation and the activity variable measured relative to their stochastic trends and thus as gaps. We study this relationship with minimal...

The Great Moderation refers to the fall in U.S. output growth volatility in the mid-1980s. At the same time, the United States experienced a moderation in inflation and lower average inflation. Using annual data since 1890, we find that an earlier 1946 moderation in output and consumption growth...

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...

Phillips curves are central to discussions of inflation dynamics and monetary policy. New Keynesian Phillips curves describe how past inflation, expected future inflation, and a measure of real marginal cost or an output gap drive the current inflation rate. This paper studies the (potential)...

Countries that specialize in commodity exports often exhibit a correlation between the relevant commodity price and the value of their currency. We explore a natural but little-studied explanation for this correlation. An increase in the commodity price leads to increases in the future values of...

A well-known feature of one-good, multi-agent, Arrow-Debreu economies with identical additively-separable, homothetic preferences is that the consumptions of all agents are perfectly correlated. Such economies are widely used in interpreting business cycles but seem to be inconsistent with...