The Phillips curve has been much flatter in the past twenty years than in the preceding decades. We consider two hypotheses. One is that prices at the microeconomic level are stickier than they used to be---in the context of the canonical Calvo model, firms are adjusting prices less often. The...

In low-rate environments, policy strategies that involve holding rates "lower for longer" (L4L) may mitigate the effects of the effective lower bound (ELB). However, these strategies work in part by managing the public's expectations, which is not always realistic. Using the Fed's large-scale...

In this paper, we examine the results of GDP trend-cycle decompositions from the estimation of bivariate unobserved components models that allow for correlated trend and cycle innovations. Three competing variables are considered in the bivariate setup along with GDP: the unemployment rate, the...

Nominal interest rates may remain substantially below the averages of the last half-century, as central bank's inflation objectives lie below the average level of inflation and estimates of the real interest rate likely to prevail over the long run fall notably short of the average real interest...