This paper shows that nominal price rigidity can arise from a failure to coordinate price changes. If a firm's desired price is increasing in others' prices, then the gains to the firm from adjusting its price after a nominal shock are greater if others adjust. This "strategic complementarity"...

A large recent literature shows that strategic interactions among actors with conflicting objectives can produce inefficient political decisions. This paper investigates an alternative explanation of such decisions: if individuals' errors in assessing the likely effects of proposed policies are...

This paper demonstrates that failures in monetary policy arise not just from dynamic inconsistency, but more importantly, from imperfect understanding of the economy and the effects of policy. Using recent and historic episodes from the United States and abroad, we show that limited knowledge on...

Estimates of growth equations have found a role for openness, particularly in explaining rapid growth among East Asian countries. But major concerns of simultaneous causality between growth and trade have been expressed. This study aims to deal with the endogeneity of trade by using as...

This paper uses play-by-play accounts of virtually all regular season National Football League games for 1998-2000 to analyze teams' choices on fourth down between trying for a first down and kicking. Dynamic programming is used to estimate the values of possessing the ball at different points...

This paper describes a new data set of the forecasts of output growth, inflation, and unemployment prepared by individual members of the Federal Open Market Committee. The paper discusses the scope of the data set, possibilities for extending it, and some potential uses. It offers a preliminary...

This paper examines an important gap in the monetary explanation of the Great Depression: the lack of a well-articulated and documented transmission mechanism of monetary shocks to the real economy. It begins by reviewing the challenge to Friedman and Schwartz's monetary explanation provided by...

From the early 1950s to the early 1990s, increases in Social Security benefits in the United States varied widely in size and timing, and were only rarely undertaken in response to short-run macroeconomic developments. This paper uses these benefit increases to investigate the macroeconomic...

Since 2008, economic policymakers and researchers have occupied a brave new economic world. Previous consensuses have been upended, former assumptions have been cast into doubt, and new approaches have yet to stand the test of time. Policymakers have been forced to improvise and researchers to...