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Has U.S. Monetary Policy Gone Off Track?
The actions of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) can be explained by the committee’s pursuit of full employment and price stability.
Journal Article
Is there a persistence problem? Part I: maybe
Empirical studies suggest that monetary policy shocks can have a sustained impact on aggregate output. How is it possible for nominal shocks to have persistent real effects? One popular explanation centers on overlapping price contracts. However, recent theoretical work has cast doubt on the price-contract story. It turns out to be extremely difficult to obtain long-lasting output effects from policy shocks in a world with staggered price setting, except under unrealistic assumptions about household tastes.
Discussion Paper
Assessing monetary accommodation: a simple empirical model of monetary policy and its implications for unemployment and inflation
This note suggests that household wealth growth and a long-forward interest rate can be used to construct a simple and convenient reference standard for assessing the current stance of monetary policy. It shows that the difference between the federal funds rate and this reference interest rate is a powerful predictor of the unemployment rate and inflation, producing real-time forecasts that are competitive with consensus-based forecasts from surveys of forecasting professionals. Moreover, one can understand past FOMC policy actions as efforts to adjust the stance of policy, so measured, in ...
Journal Article
A fresh look at the national economy
Journal Article
Optimal monetary policy in an economy with sticky nominal wages
In this article, Evan Koenig derives the optimal monetary policy rule for an economy with contractual wage agreements. The optimal rule has the monetary authority target a weighted average of aggregate output and the price level. In a realistic special case, the optimal rule calls for the monetary authority to target aggregate nominal spending. The optimal rule is quite general in form, encompassing policy proposals made by such prominent economists as Robert Hall and John Taylor. ; Koenig points out that if the monetary authority responds optimally to economic shocks, it will be difficult to ...
Journal Article
Rethinking the IS in IS-LM: adapting Keynesian tools to non-Keynesian economies Part 1
The IS-LM diagram was developed as a tool for analyzing Keynesian economies-economies with "sticky" prices and myopic households. In a series of two articles, Evan Koenig shows that a graphical apparatus similar to the traditional IS-LM diagram can be used to analyze economies that have optimizing, forward-looking households. In particular, an expectations-augmented variant of IS-LM analysis is fully consistent with a popular real-business-cycle model. Thus, the IS-LM diagram has wide applicability as a pedagogical device and as a framework within which to discuss policy. ; This article ...
Inverted Yield Curve (Nearly Always) Signals Tight Monetary Policy, Rising Unemployment
With long-term interest rates falling and short-term rates rising, there has been increasing talk of a possible yield-curve inversion and speculation about what an inversion might mean for the U.S. economy.
Journal Article
Tax reform: is the time right for a new approach?