The Federal Reserve's Dual Mandate: Statutes, Theory, Evidence, and Practice
(Revised January 2026) The Federal Open Market Committee's amended 2025 Statement on Longer-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strategy rightfully abandons the flexible average inflation targeting framework that was introduced in 2020 and followed quickly by the inflationary surge that still plagues us today. On its surface, the amended 2025 Statement, like the original 2012 Consensus Statement, interprets the Federal Reserve's statutory dual mandate in light of the natural rate hypothesis and the New Keynesian "divine coincidence." Both statements set a quantitative objective for inflation but not unemployment, acknowledge that the goals of price stability and maximum employment are generally complementary, and prescribe a balanced approach in cases where the divine coincidence breaks down. The deeper details that distinguish the 2025 and 2012 Statements suggest, however, that FOMC members continue to interpret the Phillips curve as describing a trade-off between inflation and unemployment that can be exploited by the Fed as it pursues its dual mandate. In the future as in the past, this theoretically flawed and empirically discredited view of the Phillips curve and the dual mandate leaves the Fed prone to policy errors that produce higher and more volatile rates of inflation and unemployment. Returning in full to the principles outlined in 2012 is the easiest way for the FOMC to clean up after the mistakes of recent years and prolong the Fed's useful lifetime.

Money and Business Cycles: A Historical Comparison
(Revised July 2026) A Bayesian vector autoregression, estimated with interwar and postwar US data, is used to reassess and extend Friedman and Schwartz's historical analysis of money and business cycles. The results show that while aggregate demand and supply disturbances play important roles as well, monetary policy shocks drive much of the volatility in inflation and output during both sample periods. And while monetary policy appears to have become more active in stabilizing inflation and output in the postwar compared to the interwar years, its shifting stance is reflected consistently by changes in money growth as well as interest rates. Though the Great Moderation of 1986-2008 stands out as a unique period of monetary stability, in more ways than not, postwar business cycles resemble their interwar counterparts.

Money Growth and Monetary Policy Post-2020
(Revised August 2025) This paper estimates a structural vector autoregression using a monthly dataset that covers both of the last two US recessions: in 2008-09 and 2020. The VAR uses a shadow federal funds rate series to account for the effects that unconventional monetary policy actions had on interest rates while the federal funds rate itself was constrained by the zero lower bound. It also allows for a sharp increase in shock volatility starting in March 2020. Parameter estimates and impulse responses show that information in the Divisia M2 monetary aggregate, revealed through explicit consideration of money supply and money demand, is needed to fully capture the effects that monetary policy shocks have on the economy. Historical decompositions and counterfactual simulations highlight the painful but unavoidable trade-offs faced by the Federal Reserve when confronted with severe supply-side shocks post-2020.

Reviewing the Federal Reserve's 2025 Monetary Policy Review
(Revised March 2026) (co-authored with Bryan P. Cutsinger and William J. Luther) We review the Federal Reserve's 2025 monetary policy framework review in order to determine the extent to which (1) the review process promoted the discovery of new ideas and critical feedback and (2) the resulting revisions addressed problems with the prior framework. To this end, we consider the evolution and performance of the prior framework, evaluate the review process, and assess the revisions to the Statement on Longer-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strategy. We find that the review process limited the discovery of new ideas and critical feedback by restricting the scope of potential alternatives, scheduling internal discussions prior to events intended to generate external input, and adopting ineffective structures for some Fed Listens events. These departures from best practices may help explain the inadequacies we identify with the resulting revisions, which replaced asymmetric flexible average inflation targeting with potentially-symmetric flexible inflation targeting and appears designed to preserve optionality rather than communicate the Federal Open Market Committee's reaction function.

A Return to Monetarism?
(Revised July 2026) (co-authored with Stephen Miran and Nouriel Roubini) Due to the instability of money demand, monetary policy implementation in the United States has held a smaller and smaller role for analysis of money, to the point that the Federal Reserve and therefore market participants rarely if ever mention it. However, new Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh has clearly indicated a view that money supply is relevant for monetary policy. Our contention is not that a return to targeting monetary aggregates is imminent or appropriate, but that monetary aggregates contain useful information for forecasting growth and inflation and this information should not be discarded, as it currently is. Because they generally follow the Fed, financial markets are ill equipped to understand the return of monetary analysis. We aim to bring them up to speed. We first review monetarism and its rise and decline at the Fed. Next, we survey the state-of the-art in this unjustly neglected field of macroeconomics. There is significant evidence that Divisia monetary aggregates outperform simple-sum aggregates. Finally, we extend the frontier of monetary analysis to current data through an application of the Greenspan-era P-star model.