Rational expectations and the short-run Phillips curves

The purpose of the present paper is to study certain derivable implications of the rational expectations hypothesis (REH) in the context of a simultaneous wage-price model of the U.S. economy and to subject the REH to statistical tests. The empirical evidence indicates that implementation of the REH in the context of these models does wipe out the conventional short-run Phillips curves, and the assumption that public expectations of future rates of inflation are true conditional mathematical expectations based on all available information is indeed borne out quite well against its alternatives.