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...

Phillips curves are central to discussions of inflation dynamics and monetary policy. New Keynesian Phillips curves describe how past inflation, expected future inflation, and a measure of real marginal cost or an output gap drive the current inflation rate. This paper studies the (potential)...

Phillips curves are central to discussions of inflation dynamics and monetary policy. New Keynesian Phillips curves describe how past inflation, expected future inflation, and a measure of real marginal cost or an output gap drive the current inflation rate. This paper studies the (potential)...

The US economy experienced a Great Moderation sometime in the mid-1980s -- a fall in the volatility of output growth -- at the same time as a fall in both the volatility of inflation and the average rate of inflation. We put this moderation in historical perspective by comparing it to the...

The all-gap Phillips curve (PC) explains inflation by expected inflation and an activity variable such as output or the unemployment rate, but with both inflation and the activity variable measured relative to their stochastic trends and thus as gaps. We study this relationship with minimal...

Interwar macroeconomic history is a natural place to look for evidence on the correlations between (a) deflation and depression and (b) unexpected deflation and depression. We apply time-series methods to measure unexpected deflation or inflation for 26 countries from 1922 to 1939. The results...

Countries that specialize in commodity exports often exhibit a correlation between the relevant commodity price and the value of their currency. We explore a natural but little-studied explanation for this correlation. An increase in the commodity price leads to increases in the future values of...

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...

This chapter reviews calibration techniques in macroeconomics. The discussion designs with an outline of the use of calibration in applied work. Next, a simple asset-pricing model is the setting for a demonstration of calibration and for comparison with conventional estimation and testing....