Was UK inflation more stable and/or less uncertain before 1914 or after 1945? We address these questions by estimating a statistical model with changing volatilities in transient and persistent components of inflation. Three conclusions emerge. First, since periods of high and low volatility...

We compare market prices of risk in economies with identical patterns of endowments, priors, and information flows, but two different market structures, one with complete markets, another in which consumers can trade only a single risk-free bond. We study how opportunities to speculate, uncommon...

This paper undertakes a Bayesian analysis of optimal monetary policy for the U.K. We estimate a suite of monetary-policy models that include both forward- and backward-looking representations as well as large- and small-scale models. We find an optimal simple Taylor-type rule that accounts for...

This paper tests a necessary condition for the neutrality of money in a framework that imposes only weak restrictions on the money supply process. It extends B. Bernanke's (1986) work by weakening the set of just-identifying restrictions and by providing a statistical test of the overidentifying...

This paper shows how to estimate a Bayesian VAR with drifting parameters and nonlinear cross-equation restrictions. The restrictions promote parsimony by reducing the dimension of the drifting component in conditional mean parameters. As an application, the paper investigates an...

For a VAR with drifting coefficients and stochastic volatilities, we present posterior densities for several objects that are pertinent for designing and evaluating monetary policy. These include easures of inflation persistence, the natural rate of unemployment, a core rate of inflation, and...

Previous studies have interpreted the rise and fall of US inflation after World War II in terms of the Fed's changing views about the natural rate hypothesis but have left an important question unanswered. Why was the Fed so slow to implement the low-inflation policy recommended by a natural...

This paper contributes three extensions of John H. Cochrane's work on measuring the relative stability of long-term growth. It estimates variance ratios for nine OECD countries over the period 1871-1985, presents an improved approximation to the distribution of the variance ratio, and considers...