This paper presents an empirical evaluation of the strength of the Fisher effect which predicts a positive relationship between the nominal interest rate and inflation in the postwar period in the five major industrial countries, utilizing recently developed time series techniques. The results...

The onset of financial instability in August 2007, which quickly spread across the world, raises a number of questions for policy makers. First, what are the roots of the crisis? Many factors have been emphasized in the debate, including the opacity of complex financial products; the excessive...

We argue that measurement error in historical price data has led researchers to erroneously believe that there was little persistence of inflation during the 19th century. Using a statistical technique that accounts for these errors, we estimate the persistence of (a) US inflation and (b)...