Search Results
Working Paper
The liquidity trap, the real balance effect, and the Friedman rule
This paper studies the behavior of the economy and the efficacy of monetary policy under zero nominal interest rates, using a model with population growth that nests, as a special case, a more conventional specification in which there is a single infinitely lived representative agent. The paper shows that with a growing population, monetary policy has distributional effects that give rise to a real balance effect, thereby eliminating the liquidity trap. These same distributional effects, however, can also work to make many agents much worse off under zero nominal interest rates than they are ...
Working Paper
Endogenous financial innovation and the demand for money
This paper embeds two key ideas about the nature of financial innovation taken from the empirical literature into a familiar equilibrium monetary model. It provides formal support for several alternative econometric specifications for money demand that attempt to capture the effects of financial innovation and demonstrates that a popular theoretical model of money demand, when suitably modified, can account for some unusual monetary dynamics found in the data. Thus, it helps to establish both the theoretical relevance of recent empirical work and the empirical relevance of recent theoretical ...
Working Paper
Irrational expectations and econometric practice: discussion of Orphanides and Williams, \"Inflation scares and forecast-based monetary policy\"
Athanasios Orphanides and John C. Williams' excellent conference paper, "Inflation Scares and Forecast-Based Monetary Policy," contributes importantly to the new and rapidly growing branch of the literature on bounded rationality and learning in macroeconomics. Their paper, like many others, derives interesting and useful theoretical results that show how the introduction of bounded rationality and learning impacts on the effects of monetary policy shocks and the characteristics of optimal monetary policy rules. This note suggests that some additional empirical work-some "irrational ...
Working Paper
Implementing the Friedman rule
In cash-in-advance models, necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of an equilibrium with zero nominal interest rates and Pareto-optimal allocations restrict only the very long-run, or asymptotic, behavior of the money supply. When these asymptotic conditions are satisfied, they leave the central bank with a great deal of flexibility to manage the money supply over any finite horizon. But what happens when these asymptotic conditions fail to hold? This paper shows that the central bank can still implement the Friedman rule if its actions are appropriately constrained in the ...
Journal Article
Using the permanent income hypothesis for forecasting
Working Paper
Productivity and U.S. macroeconomic performance: interpreting the past and predicting the future with a two-sector real business cycle model
A two-sector real business cycle model, estimated with postwar U.S. data, identifies shocks to the levels and growth rates of total factor productivity in distinct consumption- and investment-goods- producing technologies. This model attributes most of the productivity slowdown of the 1970s to the consumption-goods sector; it suggests that a slowdown in the investment-goods sector occurred later and was much less persistent. Against this broader backdrop, the model interprets the more recent episode of robust investment and investment-specific technological change during the 1990s largely as ...
Working Paper
Customer flows, countercyclical markups, and the persistent effects of monetary shocks
This paper develops a general equilibrium model in which households face fixed costs associated with searching for a new supplier of consumption goods. These search costs provide firms with some monopoly power over their existing customers and generate the kind of customer flow dynamics first considered by Phelps and Winter. Customer flows, in turn, cause markups of price over marginal cost to vary countercyclically, both amplify and propagate the effects of technology shocks on output, and allow the effects of monetary shocks on output to persist.
Working Paper
Liquidity effects and transactions technologies
Recently there has been renewed interest in using general equilibrium models to understand the effects of monetary policy on interest rates and real economic activity. This research effort involved the search for models that will account for the liquidity effects--the decrease in short-term interest rates and the increase in output and employment--that are associated with expansionary monetary policy.
Working Paper
The monetary transmission mechanism
The monetary transmission mechanism describes how policy-induced changes in the nominal money stock or the short-term nominal interest rate impact real variables such as aggregate output and employment. Specific channels of monetary transmission operate through the effects that monetary policy has on interest rates, exchange rates, equity and real estate prices, bank lending, and firm balance sheets. Recent research on the transmission mechanism seeks to understand how these channels work in the context of dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium models.
Journal Article
Price stability under long-run monetary targeting