To what extent did deviations from the Taylor rule between 2002 and 2006 help to promote price stability and maximum sustainable employment? To address that question, this paper estimates a New Keynesian model with unemployment and performs a counterfactual experiment where monetary policy...

An apparent disconnect has taken place between inflation and economic activity in the US over the last 25 years, with price inflation remaining remarkably stable in spite of large fluctuations in the output gap and other measures of economic slack. This observation has led some to believe that...

What drives the recent inflation surge? To answer this question, one must decompose inflation fluctuations into the contribution of structural shocks. We document how whimsical such a historical shock decomposition can be in standard vector autoregressive (VAR) models. We show that the...