The recent crisis in the United States has often been associated with substantial amounts of policy uncertainty. In this paper we ask how uncertainty about fiscal policy affects the impact of fiscal policy changes on the economy when the government tries to counteract a deep recession. The...

Highly volatile transition dynamics can emerge when a central bank disinflates while operating without full transparency. In our model, a central bank commits to a Taylor rule whose form is known but whose coefficient are not. Private agents learn about policy parameters via Bayesian updating....

How much have the dynamics of U.S. time series and in particular the transmission of innovations to monetary policy instruments changed over the last century? The answers to these questions that this paper gives are "a lot" and "probably less than you think," respectively. We use vector...

We argue in this paper that the Great Inflation of the 1970s can be understood as the result of equilibrium indeterminacy in which loose monetary policy engendered excess volatility in macroeconomic aggregates and prices. We show, however, that the Federal Reserve inadvertently pursued policies...