The appropriate role for equity prices in monetary policy deliberations has been hotly debated for some time. Recent work suggests that equity prices have affected monetary policy decisions above and beyond their indirect effect on the traditional goal variables of the FOMC. However, the...

This paper examines the concept of inflation persistence in macroeconomic theory. It begins with a definition of persistence, emphasizing the difference between reduced-form and structural persistence. It then examines a number of empirical measures of reduced-form persistence, considering the...

Would a more open and regular evaluation of the monetary policy framework improve policy in the United States? Even when considering a relatively short timeframe that spans the 1960s to the present, it is possible to point to many significant changes to the framework. Some of the changes were...

This paper examines the expectations behavior of individual responses in the Survey of Professional Forecasters, the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center survey of consumers, and the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters. It finds that the most robust feature of all of these...

This paper provides an array of empirical evidence bearing on potentially important changes in the dynamics of U.S. inflation. We examine the overall performance of Phillips curves relative to some well-known benchmarks, the efficiency with which the Federal Reserve's Greenbook forecasts of...