Search Results
Conference Paper
Three great American disinflations
This paper analyzes the role of transparency and credibility in accounting for the widely divergent macroeconomic effects of three episodes of deliberate monetary contraction: the post-Civil War deflation, the post-WWI deflation, and the Volcker disinflation. Using a dynamic general equilibrium model in which private agents use optimal filtering to infer the central bank?s nominal anchor, we demonstrate that the salient features of these three historical episodes can be explained by differences in the design and transparency of monetary policy, even without any time variation in economic ...
Working Paper
Some Implications of Uncertainty and Misperception for Monetary Policy
When choosing a strategy for monetary policy, policymakers must grapple with mismeasurement of labor market slack, and of the responsiveness of price inflation to that slack. Using stochastic simulations of a small-scale version of the Federal Reserve Board?s principal New Keynesian macroeconomic model, we evaluate representative rule-based policy strategies, paying particular attention to how those strategies interact with initial conditions in the U.S. as they are seen today and with the current outlook. To do this, we construct a current relevant baseline forecast, one that is loosely ...
Working Paper
Imperfect credibility and inflation persistence
In this paper, we formulate a dynamic general equilibrium model with staggered nominal contracts, in which households and firms use optimal filtering to disentangle persistent and transitory shifts in the monetary policy rule. The calibrated model accounts quite well for the dynamics of output and inflation during the Volcker disinflation, and implies a sacrifice ratio very close to the estimated value. Our approach indicates that inflation persistence and substantial costs of disinflation can be generated in an optimizing-agent framework, without relaxing the assumption of rational ...
Working Paper
Money-Financed Fiscal Programs : A Cautionary Tale
A number of prominent economists and policymakers have argued that money-?nanced ?scal programs (helicopter drops) could be e?cacious in boosting output and in?ation in economies facing persistent economic weakness, very low in?ation, and signi?cant ?scal strains. We employ a fairly conventional macroeconomic model to explore the possible e?ects of such policies. While we do ?nd that money-?nanced ?scal programs, if communicated successfully and seen as credible by the public, could provide signi?cant stimulus, we underscore the risks that would be associated with such a program. These risks ...
Working Paper
The Macroeconomic Effects of Trade Policy
We study the short-run macroeconomic effects of trade policies that are equivalent in a friction-less economy, namely a uniform increase in import tariffs and export subsidies (IX), an increase in value-added taxes accompanied by a payroll tax reduction (VP), and a border adjustment of corporate pro.t taxes (BAT). Using a dynamic New Keynesian open-economy framework, we summarize conditions for exact neutrality and equivalence of these policies. Neutrality requires the real exchange rate to appreciate enough to fully offset the effects of the policies on net exports. We argue that a ...
Working Paper
Nominal wage rigidities and the propagation of monetary disturbances
Recent research has challenged the ability of sticky price general equilibrium models to generate a contract multiplier, i.e., an effect of a monetary innovation on output that extends beyond the contract interval. We show that a simple dynamic general equilbrium model that includes "Taylor-style" (1980) wage and price contracts can account for a substantial contract multiplier under various assumptions about the structure of the capital market. Most interestingly, our results do not rely on a high intertemporal labor supply elasticity or elastic supply of capital: our preference ...
Working Paper
Can long-run restrictions identify technology shocks?
Gali's innovative approach of imposing long-run restrictions on a vector autoregression (VAR) to identify the effects of a technology shock has become widely utilized. In this paper, we investigate its reliability through Monte Carlo simulations of several relatively standard business cycle models. We find it encouraging that the impulse responses derived from applying the Gali methodology to the artificial data generally have the same sign and qualitative pattern as the true responses. However, we highlight the importance of small-sample bias in the estimated impulse responses and show that ...
Working Paper
Money, sticky wages, and the Great Depression
This paper examines the ability of a simple stylized general equilibrium model that incorporates nominal wage rigidity to explain the magnitude and persistence of the Great Depression in the United States. The impulses to our analysis are money supply shocks. The Taylor contracts model is surprisingly successful in accounting for the behavior of major macroaggregates and real wages during the downturn phase of the Depression, i.e., from 1929:3 through mid-1933. Our analysis provides support for the hypothesis that a monetary contraction operating through a sticky wage channel played a ...
Working Paper
Fiscal consolidation in an open economy
This paper uses a New Keynesian DSGE model of a small open economy to compare how the effects of fiscal consolidation differ depending on whether monetary policy is constrained by currency union membership or by the zero lower bound on policy rates. We show that there are important differences in the impact of fiscal shocks across these monetary regimes that depend both on the duration of the zero lower bound and on features that determine the responsiveness of inflation.
Working Paper
Tradeoffs between inflation and output-gap variances in an optimizing-agent model
We demonstrate the existence of a monetary policy tradeoff between price-inflation variability and output-gap variability in an optimizing-agent model with staggered nominal wage and price contracts. This variance tradeoff is absent only in the special case in which prices are sticky and wages are perfectly flexible. When the model is calibrated to exhibit an empirically reasonable degree of nominal wage inertia, strict inflation targeting induces substantial output-gap volatility.