Large price changes in industries affected by the COVID-19 pandemic have caused erratic fluctuations in the U.S. headline inflation rate. This paper compares alternative approaches to filtering out the transitory effects of these industry price changes and measuring the underlying or core level...

This paper investigates the effects of wage indexation on the time-consistent level of inflation. Departing from previous work on time-consistent policy, we study a structural model of the economy. Indexation reduces the cost of inflation, which is inflationary, and steepens the Phillips curve,...

This paper investigates the long-run demand for M1 in the postwar United States. Previous studies, based on data ending in the late 1980's, are inconclusive about the parameters of postwar money demand. This paper obtains precise estimates of these parameters by extending the data through 1996....

Many Keynesian macroeconomic models are based on the assumption that firms change prices at different times. This paper presents an explanation for this "staggered" price setting. We develop a model in which firms have imperfect knowledge of the current state of the economy and gain information...

This paper is a contribution to the analysis of optimal monetary policy. It begins with a critical assessment of the existing literature, arguing that most work is based on implausible models of inflation-output dynamics. It then suggests that this problem may be solved with some recent...

This paper shows that small costs of changing nominal prices can lead to rigidities that cause highly inefficient fluctuations in real variables. As a result, aggregate demand stabilization can be very desirable even though the frictions that cause fluctuations in aggregate demand to have real...

This paper presents a theory of the real effects of disinflation. As in New Keynesian models, price adjustment is staggered across firms, As in New Classical models, credibility is imperfect: the monetary authority may not complete a promised disinflation. The combination of imperfect...

This paper shows that nominal price rigidity can arise from a failure to coordinate price changes. If a firm's desired price is increasing in others' prices, then the gains to the firm from adjusting its price after a nominal shock are greater if others adjust. This "strategic complementarity"...

This paper investigates the determinants of the "sacrifice ratio" for disinflation: the ratio of the loss in output to the fall in trend inflation. I develop a method for estimating the sacrifice ratio in individual disinflation episodes, and apply it to 65 episodes in moderate-inflation OECD...

The paper estimates a long-run demand function for M1, using U.S. data for 1959-1993. This paper interprets deviations from this long-run relation with Goldfeld's partial adjustment model. A key innovation is the choice of the interest rate in the money demand function. Most previous work uses a...