For a Markov decision problem in which unknown transition probabilities serve as hidden state variables, we study the quality of two approximations to the decision rule of a Bayesian who each period updates his subjective distribu- tion over the transition probabilities by Bayes' law. The first...

Friedman and Schwartz hypothesized that the Great Depression created ex- aggerated fears of economic instability. We quantify their idea by using a robustness calculation to shatter a representative consumer's initial confidence in the parameters of a two-state Markov chain that truly governs...

The foundation of the New Keynesian Phillips curve is a model of price setting with nominal rigidities which implies that the dynamics of inflation are well explained by the evolution of real marginal costs. The objective of this paper is to analyze whether this is a structurally-invariant...

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