What monetary policy framework, if adopted by the Federal Reserve, would have avoided the Great Inflation of the 1960s and 1970s? The authors use counterfactual simulations of an estimated model of the U.S. economy to evaluate alternative monetary policy strategies. The authors document that policymakers at the time both had an overly optimistic view of the natural rate of unemployment and put a high priority on achieving full employment. They show that in the presence of realistic informational imperfections and with an emphasis on stabilizing economic activity, an optimal control approach would have failed to keep inflation expectations well anchored, resulting in highly volatile inflation during the 1970s. Charts and tables.

This book develops the idea of rational expectations and surveys its use in economics today.

This book puts forward the view that rational expectations have a key role in formulating economic policy and in determining economic activity, prices, interest rates, and employment rates. Arguing that economic policy crucially depends upon expectations about future government policies, the author supports his thesis by drawing on monetary theory as well as on the actual experiences of several post-World War II countries.

Monetary policy faces a particularly difficult task in most economies going through structural reforms: having to stabilise fluctuations around the trend, central banks have also to deal with a trend that is itself subjected to shifts, as a result of reforms. This book proposes some perspectives on these issues, with various contributions from both practitioners and academics, emphasising how rather simple techniques can be conveniently used to solve complex problems. Several issues are hence considered, each emphasising a particular aspect of the theme proposed: (i) forecasting inflation, with the experience of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand being taken as an example, since this country went through drastic structural change, (ii) understanding underlying trends of inflation, focusing on expectations and data revision, wage-bargaining process and more generally supply effects, since structural change magnifies them, (iii) formulating policy recommendations, the example taken is the strategy towards the euro for Eastern European countries and (iv) assessing risks of sudden stops.

The major purpose of this work is to make staying up to date with rational expectations (RE) easier for economists in government, academia and industry, as well as for students.