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Working Paper
A comparison of alternative monetary environments
Working Paper
Central bank responsibility, seigniorage, and welfare
Historically, countries have relied on seigniorage. In this paper, we explore a set of features in which a benevolent government will rely on seigniorage. We use a simple overlapping generations model with return-dominated money. Money is valued because of a reserve requirement. The government has to raise a fixed amount of revenue solely for the purposes of making transfers to the old. It has two revenue-generating options: lump-sum taxes (money creation) under the control of the treasury (central bank). We restrict the amount of seigniorage collected to be nonnegative and require that the ...
Working Paper
Asymmetric information and the role of FED watching
Journal Article
Monetary policy arithmetic: some recent contributions
Sargent and Wallace (1981) study the feasibility of a bond-financed increase in government spending. In their "unpleasant monetarist arithmetic," Sargent and Wallace show how using bonds to finance a permanent deficit today may necessitate faster money growth in the future, yielding higher inflation today. The logic behind this spectacular result is predicated on the satisfaction of one crucial condition: the real interest rate offered on bonds has to exceed the real growth rate of the economy. Joydeep Bhattacharya and Joseph Haslag review some recent contributions to the literature on ...
Journal Article
The U.S. economy: a brighter outlook after a bumpy ride
Journal Article
U.S. economic forecasts calls for slightly slower growth
Working Paper
Evaluating monetary base targeting rules
Journal Article
Monetary aggregates and the rate of inflation
Some economists advocate focusing less emphasis on monetary aggregates because the relationship of monetary aggregates to the ultimate goals of monetary policy is less reliable now than in the past. But the stability of the relationship between money growth and inflation is a testable hypothesis. Joseph Haslag investigates whether money growth is currently as useful a predictor of inflation as it previously has been. He tests three different measures of money growth: the monetary base, M1 and M2. Haslag finds that the relationship remains stable over time. ; Haslag also finds that both the ...
Working Paper
Coyote crossings : the role of smugglers in illegal immigration and border enforcement
Illegal immigration and border enforcement in the United States have increased concomitantly for over thirty years. One interpretation is that U.S. border policies have been ineffective. We offer an alternative view, extending the current immigration-enforcement literature by incorporating both the practice of people smuggling and a role for non-wage income into a two-country, dynamic general equilibrium model. We state conditions under which two steady state equilibria exist: one with a low level of capital and high amount of illegal immigration and the other with a high level of capital, ...