This paper quantifies the welfare implications of the U.S. Social Security program during the Great Recession. We find that the average welfare losses due to the Great Recession for agents alive at the time of the shock are notably smaller in an economy with Social Security relative to an...

What does the level of the real interest rates tell us about where the economy, or one's portfolio, is headed? The answer to this question depends on one's estimate of the ``equilibrium'' value of real interest rates, a measure that is unfortunately not directly observed in the market place. In...

Inflation measurement is the process through which changes in the prices of individual goods and services are combined to yield a measure of general price change. This paper discusses the conceptual framework for thinking about inflation measurement and considers practical issues associated with...

We add a nominal tax system to a sticky-price monetary business cycle model. When nominal interest income is taxed, the coefficient on inflation in a Taylor-type monetary policy rule must be significantly larger than one in order for the model economy to have a determinate rational expectations...

This paper estimates the effects of oil price changes on U.S. inflation in a Phillips curve framework, allowing for some of the asymmetries, nonlinearities, and structural breaks that have been found in the literature on the real effects of oil price shocks. It finds that since around 1980, oil...

I estimate sticky-price and sticky-information models of price setting for the United States via maximum-likelihood techniques, reaching several conclusions. First, the sticky-price model fits best, and captures inflation dynamics as well as reduced-form equations once hybrid-behavior is...

Macroeconomists have for some time been aware that the New Keynesian Phillips curve, though highly popular in the literature, cannot explain the persistence observed in actual inflation. We argue that one of the more prominent alternative formulations, the Fuhrer and Moore (1995) relative...