Why is inflation so much lower and at the same time more stable in developed economies in the 1990s, compared with the 1970s? This paper suggests that the United Kingdom, United States and other countries may have escaped from a volatile inflation equilibrium. Our argument builds on the story...

Although the target of monetary policy is clear, there have been suggestions that the conduct of monetary policy is improved by monitoring "trimmed mean" inflation rates, the mean of some central portion of the distribution of price changes. This paper assesses critically the theoretical and...

This paper looks at disaggregated price data in the U.K. to see if there is evidence of downward nominal rigidity: are prices less likely to fall after a downward shock than they are to rise after an upward shock? The test is to see if, as the mean inflation rate falls, the skewness, or the...

Using post-war data on 43 countries, this paper shows that the finding that the trade-off between inflation and output falls as inflation rises is quite robust. The implication is that the real effects of monetary policy might be greater as the economy moves towards price stability. The paper...