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Working Paper
Inflation and real activity with firm-level productivity shocks
In the last ten years there has been an explosion of empirical work examining price setting behavior at the micro level. The work has in turn challenged existing macro models that attempt to explain monetary nonneutrality, because these models are generally at odds with much of the micro price data. In response, economists have developed a second generation of sticky-price models that are state dependent and that include both fixed costs of price adjustment and idiosyncratic shocks. Nonetheless, some ambiguity remains about the extent of monetary nonneutrality that can be attributed to costly ...
Conference Paper
Real business cycles and the test of the Adelmans
Journal Article
Inflation Targeting in a St. Louis Model of the 21st Century
Working Paper
A note on the neutrality of temporary monetary disturbances
In the classical macroeconomic models constructed by Lucas (1972, 1975) and Barro (1976), monetary aggregates are assumed to be generated by a logarithmic random walk. This specification implies that all monetary growth is (a) unanticipated and (b) permanent.
Journal Article
Quantitative theory and econometrics
Working Paper
Informational implications of interest rate rules
Returning to a topic first systematically treated by Poole (1970) in a textbook Keynesian model, this paper compares interest rate and money supply rules. Our analysis, by contrast, is conducted within a rational expectations macro model that incorporates flexible prices and informational frictions. With differential information, interest rate targets can affect the information content of market prices and real activity, but these real consequences can always be replicated by an appropriately chosen money stock rule with feedback to economic activity. However, when the policy authority has ...
Working Paper
The pitfalls of discretionary monetary policy.
In a canonical staggered pricing model, monetary discretion leads to multiple private sector equilibria. The basis for multiplicity is a form of policy complementarity. Specifically, prices set in the current period embed expectations about future policy, and actual future policy responds to these same prices. For a range of values of the fundamental state variable ? a ratio of predetermined prices ? there is complementarity between actual and expected policy, and multiple equilibria occur. Moreover, this multiplicity is not associated with reputational considerations: it occurs in a ...
Working Paper
Optimal monetary policy
Optimal monetary policy maximizes welfare, given frictions in the economic environment. Constructing a model with two sets of frictions - the Keynesian friction of costly price adjustment by imperfectly competitive firms and the Monetarist friction of costly exchange of wealth for goods - we find optimal monetary policy is governed by two familiar principles. First, the average level of the nominal interest rate should be sufficiently low, as suggested by Milton Friedman, that there should be deflation on average. Yet, the Keynesian frictions imply that the optimal nominal interest rate is ...