Commenting on these empirical studies in 2004 as a Federal Reserve Board governor two years prior to his appointment as chairman, Ben Bernanke expressed support for more research to determine what he called the “optimal long-run inflation rate,” or OLIR. While he noted that the 2 percent figure may seem to be robust to a “variety of
assumptions about the costs of inflation, the structure of the economy, the distribution of shocks, etc.,” he recommended more research to clarify the range of uncertainty surrounding it. He also suggested more research into a variety of details, including the specification of the inflation index and the assumptions made about the long-run properties of the models. He concluded that: