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Working Paper
Monetary policy and inflation dynamics
Since the early 1980s, the United States economy has changed in some important ways: Inflation now rises considerably less when unemployment falls and the volatility of output and inflation have fallen sharply. This paper examines whether changes in monetary policy can account for these phenomena. The results suggest that changes in the parameters and shock volatility of monetary policy reaction functions can account for most or all of the change in the inflation-unemployment relationship. As in other work, monetary-policy changes can explain only a small portion of the output growth ...
Working Paper
The Wage Curve and the Phillips Curve
Blanchflower and Oswald (1994) have argued that, in regional data, the level of unemployment is related to the level of wages. This result is at variance with the implications of the original Phillips curve for regional data, which would predict that the change in wages ought to be related to the unemployment rate. On the other hand, there is considerable empirical support for the expectations-augmented Phillips curve using macroeconomic data. I resolve this tension by showing that a standard macroeconomic expectations-augmented Phillips curve can be derived from microfoundations that begin ...
Working Paper
Is hysteresis important for U.S. unemployment?
We look for evidence of "hysteresis" in the U.S. unemployment rate - that is, that current labor market outcomes affect the future equilibrium level of the unemployment rate. We first examine (using a variety of econometric tests for unit roots) whether the unemployment rate tends to come back to a long-run average over time. On balance, our results suggest that the unemployment rate tends to return to a long-run value, ruling out the possibility of permanent hysteresis. We look for evidence of temporary hysteresis by examining whether lagged unemployment enters a standard Phillips-curve ...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy Strategies for a Low-Rate Environment
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 macroeconometric model, we study the effectiveness of L4L policies when financial market participants are forward-looking but other agents are not. We find that the resulting limited ability to manage expectations reduces but does not eliminate the advantages of L4L policies. The best policies provide ...
Working Paper
When Can Trend-Cycle Decompositions Be Trusted?
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 inflation rate, and gross domestic income. We find that the unemployment rate is the best variable to accompany GDP in the bivariate setup to obtain accurate estimates of its trend-cycle correlation coefficient and the cycle. We show that the key feature of unemployment that allows for precise ...
Working Paper
The Role of Expectations in Changed Inflation Dynamics
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 other is that the expectations of firms and households about future inflation are now less well informed by macroeconomic conditions; because expectations are important in the setting of current-period prices, inflation is therefore less sensitive to macroeconomic conditions. To distinguish between our ...
Working Paper
From many series, one cycle: improved estimates of the business cycle from a multivariate unobserved components model
We construct new estimates of potential output and the output gap using a multivariate approach that allows for an explicit role for measurement errors in the decomposition of real output. Because we include data on hours, output, employment, and the labor force, we are able to decompose our estimate of potential output into separate trends in labor productivity, labor-force participation, weekly hours, and the NAIRU. We find that labor-market variables?especially the unemployment rate?are the most informative individual indicators of the state of the business cycle. Conditional on including ...
Working Paper
Using structural shocks to identify models of investment
This paper uses the response of investment to identified structural shocks to investigate some key issues, including the nature of adjustment costs and investment's responsiveness to user cost. In the estimation, the model parameters are chosen to match as closely as possible the impulse responses from an identified VAR. In the preferred results, both investment- and capital-stock adjustment costs are important; the size of the capital-stock adjustment costs is in line with estimates from firm-level studies; the investment-adjustment costs suggest rapid adjustment of investment to its desired ...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy in a Low Interest Rate World
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 rate experienced over this period. Persistently low nominal interest rates may lead to more frequent and costly episodes at the effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates. We revisit the frequency and potential costs of such episodes in a low-interest-rate world in a ...
Working Paper
Estimates of the productivity trend using time-varying parameter techniques
In the second half of the 1990s, U.S. productivity growth moved up to rates not seen in several decades. In this paper, I use time-varying parameter techniques to isolate trend from cyclical movements in productivity and to obtain an estimate of the trend rate of productivity growth. I examine models both with and without an explicit role for capital accumulation. I find that in the models without an explicit role for capital accumulation, trend productivity growth is estimated to have moved up from around 1-1/2 percent in the period from the early 1970s to the mid 1990s, to about 2-1/2 ...