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The paper re‐examines the real effects of credible disinflation in the presence of real wage rigidities and non‐linear dynamics. A credible, gradual disinflation is shown to lead to a delayed output slump along the transition path if real wage rigidities are sufficiently strong. This result is novel and holds across alternative models of nominal inertia—price staggering and price adjustment costs. In the special case of a cold‐turkey disinflation, price adjustment costs imply an immediate but short‐lived slump while price staggering implies a long‐lasting boom.

The paper studies the macroeconomic effects of government spending shocks in an economy characterized by positive trend growth. It shows that the lower is the trend growth rate the less inflationary are government spending shocks and vice versa. Moreover, on impact output is higher but exhibits less persistence the lower is trend growth, an effect that also characterizes consumption and the government spending multiplier, given that consumption and labor are somewhat complementary.

With interest rates in most developed countries close to zero, it is not possible for monetary policymakers to stimulate the economy by reducing interest rates. As a result the economy is unusually sensitive to the possibility of deflation, and thoughts turn to fiscal policy in order to stabilize output and prices. This paper summarizes the current academic debate on the role of fiscal policy under current conditions. In particular, this paper argues that policymakers need to be explicit about their objectives concerning spending, debt, and inflation, to avoid expectations-driven fluctuations in output and inflation.

We analyze optimal monetary policy when a central bank has to learn about an unknown coefficient that determines the effect of surprise inflation on aggregate demand. We derive the optimal policy under active learning and compare it to two limiting cases-certainty equivalence policy and cautionary policy, in which learning takes place passively. Our novel result is that the two passive learning policies represent an upper and lower bound for the active learning policy, irrespective of the state of the economy.

In a model with forward-looking expectations, the paper examines communication of central bank forecasts when the inflation target is subject to unobserved changes. It characterizes the effect of disclosure of forecasts on inflation and output stabilization and the choice of an active versus passive monetary policy. The paper shows that these choices depend on the slope of the Phillips curve, the central bank's preference weight on inflation relative to output and the ratio of the variability of the inflation target relative to the cost-push disturbance. The paper briefly discusses how disclosure of forecasts may be beneficial for a society that is more concerned about inflation stabilization than the central bank.

We analyze the effects of government spending in a New-Keynesian model with search and matching frictions featuring endogenous growth through learning-by-doing and skill loss from long-term unemployment. We show that medium-run and long-run output and unemployment multipliers are much larger compared to the standard model that abstracts from endogenous growth and skill loss. In our model the aggregate effect of a temporary fiscal stimulus is amplified via the skill loss channel through lower training costs. Via the learning-by-doing channel, it leads to hysteresis in human capital accumulation and thereby output. These results hold for alternative forms of fiscal financing (lump-sum tax, distortionary tax and government debt) as well as alternative labor market institutions (US and Europe).

We analyze determinacy and stability under learning (E-stability) of rational expectations equilibria in the Blanchard and Galí (2006, 2008) New-Keynesian model of inflation and unemployment, where labor market frictions due to costs of hiring workers play an important role. We derive results for alternative specifications of monetary policy rules and alternative values of hiring costs as a percentage of GDP. Under low hiring costs - a typical part of the U.S. calibration - for policy rules based on current period inflation and unemployment our results are similar to those of Bullard and Mitra (2002). However, we find that the region of indeterminacy and E-instability in the policy space increases with the hiring costs. So, higher hiring costs - consistent with the European 'sclerotic' labor market institutions - seem to play an important part in explaining unemployment instability. Under lagged data based rules the area where monetary policy delivers both determinacy and E-stability shrinks. These rules perform worse according to these two dimensions when hiring costs go up. Finally, under expectations-based rules - unlike Bullard and Mitra (2002) - an additional explosive region is introduced. Here also the scope for determinacy and E-stability oriented monetary policy decreases. Interestingly - under the same rule and European 'sclerotic' labor market institutions we find that responding too much to expected inflation and too little to expected unemployment may very well be self-defeating. When hiring costs are large, a central bank that follows such a policy rule could very easily end up in the worst-case scenario of both indeterminacy and E-instability.

In a model with forward-looking behavior, we study disclosure policy when a central bank has private information on the future state of the economy. We find that the effects of advance disclosure depend on the presence of uncertainty about policy targets when the shock occurs. With uncertainty about policy targets, disclosure is harmless to current outcomes, owing to the strong dependence of inflation expectations on policy actions, which induces the central bank to focus exclusively on price stability. If the central bank's targets are common knowledge, disclosure of future shocks impairs stabilization of current inflation and output. [Copyright 2006 Elsevier B.V.]

Over the last few decades, hours worked per capita have declined substantially in many OECD economies. Using the standard neoclassical growth model with endogenous work–leisure choice, we assess the role of trend growth slowdown in accounting for the decline in hours worked. In the model, a permanent reduction in technological growth decreases steady‐state hours worked by increasing the consumption–output ratio. Our empirical analysis exploits cross‐country variation in the timing and size of the decline in technological growth to show that technological growth has a highly significant positive effect on hours. A decline in the long‐run trend of technological growth by 1 percentage point is associated with a decline in trend hours worked in the range of 1–3%. This result is robust to controlling for taxes, which have been found in previous studies to be an important determinant of hours. Our empirical finding is quantitatively in line with the one implied by a calibrated version of the model, though evidence for the model's implication that the effect on hours works via changes in the consumption–output ratio is rather mixed.

In this paper we incorporate the term structure of interest rates in a standard inflation forecast targeting framework. We find that under flexible inflation targeting and uncertainty in the degree of persistence in the economy, allowing for active learning possibilities has effects on the optimal interest rate rule followed by the central bank. For a wide range of possible initial beliefs about the unknown parameter, the dynamically optimal rule is in general more activist, in the sense of responding aggressively to the state of the economy, than the myopic rule for small to moderate deviations of the state variable from its target. On the other hand, for large deviations, the optimal policy is less activist than the myopic and the certainty equivalence policies.