Much research studies US inflation history with a trend-cycle model with unobserved components. A key feature of this model is that the trend may be viewed as the Fed’s evolving inflation target or long-horizon expected inflation. We provide a new way to measure the slowly evolving trend and...

Phillips curves are central to discussions of inflation dynamics and monetary policy. The hybrid new Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) describes how past inflation, expected future inflation, and a measure of real aggregate demand drive the current inflation rate. This paper studies the...

We provide a new way to filter US inflation into trend and cycle components, based on extracting long-run forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. We operate the Kalman filter in reverse, beginning with observed forecasts, then estimating parameters, and then extracting the...

The Great Moderation refers to the fall in U.S. output growth volatility in the mid-1980s. At the same time, the United States experienced a moderation in inflation and lower average inflation. Using annual data since 1890, we find that an earlier, 1946 moderation in output and consumption...

We present numerical estimates of the effect on the dollar/sterling exchange rate in the early 1920s of anticipations of the return to the gold standard at pre-war parity in the U.K. These measures are calculated using a weak version of the monetary model of the exchange rate but are consistent...

A test of a dynamic, macroeconomic model with free parameters is provided by comparing its features, such as moments, with those of historical data. We provide a method for studying the distribution of the sample moment under the null hypothesis that the model is true. We calculate the size of...

We examine hypotheses about the relationship between provisional estimates and final values of M1, M2, and M3 and their growth rates in Canada, using monthly data and multiple revisions. Preliminary values cannot be viewed as final values plus an error (revision) uncorrelated with these but they...

Interwar macroeconomic history is a natural place to look for evidence on the correlation between output growth and inflation or unexpected inflation. We apply time-series methods to measure unexpected inflation for more than twenty countries using both retail and wholesale prices. There is a...

A well-known feature of one-good, multi-agent, Arrow-Debreu economies with identical additively-separable, homothetic preferences is that the consumptions of all agents are perfectly correlated. Such economies are widely used in interpreting business cycles but seem to be inconsistent with...