John H. Cochrane

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Long-term bonds and new-Keynesian models.

Comments on “Downward Nominal Rigidities and Bond Premia” by François Gourio and Phuong Ngo, at the Fall 2023 NBER Asset Pricing meeting. (November 2023). My slides are here. A YouTube video of the conference is here, I start at 7:35. The paper is really nice, using asymmetrical price adjustment costs to make the Phillips curve steeper at high inflation, thus change the inflation-output correlation and the risk premium in the term structure. Faced with a clean paper, my discussion talks about broader issues: how to think about term premiums (long term yields vs short term yields), and complaint about why we persist in using the same new-Keynesian models despite pathologies that have been known, and in some cases fixed, for 30 years. The latter is the most fun.