On what the research is about:

The research I’m going to talk about is part of a long agenda. It has to do with the way that central banks and governments intervene in the economy.

For the last 20 or 30 years, central banks have, by and large, focused on fighting inflation. After we had the big shocks in the 1970s, that was the major problem, and that’s what they’ve spent their main efforts doing. Some of the central banks, like the Federal Reserve, have a dual mandate. In addition to worrying about inflation, they also have to worry about unemployment.