Michelson-Morley, Occam and Fisher: The radical implications of stable inflation at the zero bound
Slides for talk at the European Financial Association, August 2016. This turned in to the paper by the same name above. It's an evolution of the similar slides for my talk given at the Columbia-New York Fed conference honoring Michael Woodford May 18-19 2016. The ZLB is a deeply revealing moment for monetary economics, like Michelson-Morley's famous experiment. Nothing happened. Many theories say big things should have happened, and those theories are wrong. (Well, unless you add epicycles, ether drag, or other ugly complications. Hence Occam's razor.) In the new version I incorporate Sims' insight for how to get a temporary negative inflation out of a rate rise. In the same vein slides for a 1.5 hour MBA class covering all of monetary economics from Friedman, Sargent-Wallace, Taylor, Woodford, and FTPL.