We distinguish between the goods and services sectors in an otherwise standard unobserved components model of US inflation. Our main finding is that, while both sectors used to contribute to the overall variation in aggregate trend inflation, since the 1990s this variation has been driven almost...

Within the context of threshold regressions, we show that asymptotically-valid likelihood-ratio-based confidence intervals for threshold parameters perform poorly in finite samples when the threshold effect is large. A large threshold effect leads to a poor approximation of the profile...

How and under what circumstances can adjusting the inflation target serve as a stabilization-policy tool and contribute to welfare improvement? We answer these questions quantitatively with a standard New Keynesian model that includes cost-push type shocks which create a trade-off between...

Does raising an inflation target require increasing the nominal interest rate in the short run? We answer this question using a standard New Keynesian model with rich backward-looking elements. We first analytically show that the short-run comovement between inflation and the nominal interest...

We propose the use of likelihood-based confidence sets for the timing of structural breaks in parameters from time series regression models. The confidence sets are valid for the broad setting of a system of multivariate linear regression equations under fairly general assumptions about the...

An updated version of our Markov-switching model of U.S. real GDP clearly suggests the COVID-19 recession was more U shaped than L shaped. As with linear time series models, it is important to account for extreme outliers during the pandemic, but a simple decay function for volatility from...