BOSTON (MarketWatch)—It may be wise to run a “high pressure” economy with a tight labor market to reverse some of the negative effects of the Great Recession, Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen said Friday.

In a speech at a Boston Fed conference on the “not-so-great recovery,” Yellen said a disappointing economy may force economists to think about the economy in new ways.

Before the crisis, most economists thought the amount of output of goods and services was primarily driven by supply, Yellen said. “This conclusion deserves to be reconsidered in light of the failures of the level of economic activity to return to its prerecession trend in most advanced economies.”

Her remarks suggest that Yellen agrees, at least in some part, with former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who said that secular stagnation, or a lack of demand, is pushing down global growth.

“For the Fed chair to openly discuss the merits of a “high-pressure economy” is a sign of how far this idea has progressed into the policy mainstream,” said Krishna Guha, an analyst for Evercore ISI.

Thomas Simons, an economist at Jefferies, said Yellen’s comments “show she is willing to let inflation run a little bit higher than [2%] target for a time and that the Fed is going to err on the side of being a little too slow in [raising rates] rather than too fast.”

If one assumes that demand is holding back outlook, “the natural next question is to ask whether it might be possible to reverse these adverse supply-side effects by temporarily running a ‘high-pressure economy,’ with robust aggregate demand and a tight labor market,” Yellen said.

Quincy Krosby, market strategist at Prudential Financial, said Yellen’s speech could be seen as adding another reason for holding off raising rates in December.

For now, December remains on the able “as this speech can be interpreted as purely economic theorizing and thinking aloud,” Krosby added.

Policy makers want to keep policy more easy during recoveries than would be called for under the traditional view that supply is largely independent of demand, she said.

At the same time, Yellen noted an easy interest-rate stance “could have costs that exceed the benefits by increasing the risk of financial instability or undermining price stability.”

The strategy remains hard to quantify, and other policies might be better suited to address damage to the supply side of the economy, the Fed chairwoman added.

Sal Guatiere, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets, said he thought the Fed was still on track to raise rates in December as long as the economic data cooperate.

Yellen said the idea of a high—pressure economy is one question for economists to answer.

She laid out a few other questions, such as whether the persistent rise in the personal-savings rate since the crisis might be “transitory.”

And getting at the root of the financial crisis, Yellen asked the economic profession to study what can Fed interest-rate policy and financial oversight do to reduce the frequency and severity of future crises.

She also asked economist to try to contemplate why the influence of labor-market conditions on inflation seems to be weaker than had been thought before the financial crisis.

And the Fed chairwoman asked how a central bank might influence the public’s expectation of future inflation.

Yellen said more study was needed on how the Fed could influence expectations of future interest rates and inflation.

She said the Fed guidance that it would hold rates low, which lasted from 2011 through 2014, might be needed again, given that it remains unlikely that reductions in short-term interest rates alone will be an adequate response to a future recession.