The conquest of U.S. inflation: learning and robustness to model uncertainty

Timothy Cogley () and Thomas Sargent ()

No 478, Working Paper Series from European Central Bank

Abstract: Previous studies have interpreted the rise and fall of U.S. in ation after World War II in terms of the Fed's changing views about the natural rate hypothesis but have left an important question unanswered. Why was the Fed so slow to implement the low-in ation policy recommended by a natural rate model even after economists had developed statistical evidence strongly in its favor? Our answer features model uncertainty. Each period a central bank sets the systematic part of the in ation rate in light of updated probabilities that it assigns to three competing models of the Phillips curve. Cautious behavior induced by model uncertainty can explain why the central bank presided over the in ation of the 1970s even after the data had convinced it to place much the highest probability on the natural rate model.

Keywords: Natural unemployment rate; Phillips curve; Bayes' law; anticipated utility; robustness. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E31 E58 E65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-mac and nep-mon
Date: 2005-04
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Journal Article: The conquest of US inflation: Learning and robustness to model uncertainty (2005)
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