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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 ...
Journal Article
Commentary on \\"Monetary policy as equilibrium selection\\"
Working Paper
Changes in the Federal Reserve's inflation target: causes and consequences
This paper estimates a New Keynesian model to draw inferences about the behavior of the Federal Reserve?s unobserved inflation target. The results indicate that the target rose from 1- 1/4 percent in 1959 to over 8 percent in the mid-to-late 1970s before falling back below 2-1/2 percent in 2004. The results also provide some support for the hypothesis that over the entire postwar period, Federal Reserve policy has systematically translated short-run price pressures set off by supply-side shocks into more persistent movements in inflation itself, although considerable uncertainty remains about ...
Working Paper
A method for taking models to the data
This paper develops a method for combining the power of a dynamic, stochastic, general-equilibrium model with the flexibility of a vector autoregressive time-series model to obtain a hybrid that can be taken directly to the data.
Journal Article
Price stability under long-run monetary targeting