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 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...

As noted in surveys by Goodfriend and King (1997) and Walsh (1998) and exemplified by models analyzed in Taylor (1999), there is encouraging progress in developing optimizing trend-deviation macro models that provide useful insights into the transmission and design of monetary policy. Several...

This paper discusses four potential sources of lag dynamics in inflation: non-rational behavior, staggered contracting, frictions on price adjustment, and shifts in the long-run inflation anchor of agent expectations (the perceived inflation target). Expressions for inflation dynamics from...