In his 1999 monograph The Conquest of American Inflation Tom Sargent describes how a policymaker, who applies a constant-gain algorithm in estimating the Phillips curve, can fall into the grip of an induction problem: concluding on the basis of reduced-form evidence that the trade-off between...

This paper considers the "Lucas"-critique issue of how the indicator role of auction prices is affected when the central bank attempts to exploit the correlation between auction prices and inflation. This question is examined using a simple macroeconomic model with rational expectations (perfect...

An issue with monetary policy rules to guide inflation is the indeterminacy of the price level. In the context of a traditional backward-looking and a modern forward-looking New-Keynesian Phillips curve, this paper examines the dynamic and steady state properties of interest rate rules anchored...

This paper present a variety of approaches to estimating error-correction relationships between CPI inflation and selected commodity price indices, based on their ability to to forecast out-of-sample predictions of CPI inflation. Depending on specification, commodity prices have marginal value...

This paper presents an equation of the dynamic path of prices in a monopolistically competitive market in which firms sell to both old and new customers. Both types are able to search for the lowest price, given search costs, where the expected number of searches is given by the inverse of the...

In the late 1960s and into the 1970s, the United States experienced a burst of inflation the origins of which seemed hard to uncover. This paper advances the idea that the Fed simply got the model wrong. We assume that the true model of the economy is a variant of the standard New Keynesian...

This paper examines the properties of interest rate rules aimed at controlling aggregate price inflation. Policies are compared in two models having either flexible or sticky inflation The latter is assumed to derive from a traditional, adaptive-expectations augmented Phillips curve. The...

This is an examination of VAR modeling used to generate expectations for forward-looking variables in the Federal Reserve's macro-economic model FRB/US. Aside from analyzing economic as well aseconometric properties of VAR models currently in use, this paper evaluates certain improvements to...