We study how a concern for robustness modifies a policy maker's incentive to experiment. A policy maker has a prior over two submodels of inflation-unemployment dynamics. One submodel implies an exploitable trade-off, the other does not. Bayes' law gives the policy maker an incentive to...

Previous studies have interpreted the rise and fall of U.S. inflation after World War II in terms of the Fed's changing views about the natural rate hypothesis but have left an important question unanswered. Why was the Fed so slow to implement the low-in ation policy recommended by a natural...

We use a flexible statistical model with stochastic volatilities to measure price level uncertainty and instability in the U.S. over the period 1850-2012. Major outbreaks associated with the Civil War, the two World Wars and Great Depression, and the Great Inflation and Great Recession alternate...