Essay on macroeconomics and expectations

Abstract

My dissertation focuses on the interactions between the conduct of U.S. monetary policy and the expectations formed by households, firms and public institutions about the state of economy. The first two chapters develop new methods that I use in the subsequent chapters to study how expectations formed by economic agents about future economic conditions affect a given economy. The second chapter considers and extends the work in Farmer (2012a) to explain U.S. post-war data, and shows that it outperforms conventional economic theories due to its ability to account for persistent movements in the data. The last chapter explores how the effectiveness of monetary policy changed in the U.S. post-war period, and I provide evidence that since the early 1980's the monetary authority implemented policies that reduced economic uncertainty deriving from unforeseen changes in the expectations about future inflation.