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Conference Paper
Macroeconomic implications
Journal Article
Price-level uncertainty and inflation targeting
In this paper, Dittmar, Gavin and Kydland make two points about commonly proposed rules for inflation targeting. First, they argue that there is a great deal of uncertainty about the price level and inflation inherent in current proposals to target inflation. They show that the degree to which the central bank cares about the real economy can have a large impact on price level (and inflation) uncertainty. They find that the magnitudes of uncertainty that prevailed across the G-10 throughout the last four decades are the expected consequence of commonly proposed inflation-targeting regimes. ...
Working Paper
Argentina's capital gap puzzle
Argentinas GDP per working age person in 2003 was about the same as it was twenty years earlier and around fifteen percent below trend. By international standards that has been a dismal performance whose ultimate sources are important to uncover to eventually reverse that countrys seemingly secular decline. The purpose of this paper is precisely to take a first step towards that understanding. To that effect, we examine Argentinas recent growth experience, which includes two deep recessions and a recovery, with the lens of a neoclassical growth model that takes total factor productivity as ...
Report
International real business cycles
We ask whether a two-country real business cycle model can account simultaneously for domestic and international aspects of business cycles. With this question in mind, we document a number of discrepancies between theory and data. The most striking discrepancy concerns the correlations of consumption and output across countries. In the data, outputs are generally more highly correlated across countries than consumptions. In the model we see the opposite.
Working Paper
Argentina's recovery and "excess" capital shallowing of the 1990s
The paper examines Argentinas economic expansion in the 1990s through the lens of a parsimonious neoclassical growth model. The main finding is that investment remained considerably weaker than what the model would have predicted. The resulting excessive capital shallowing could be identified as a weakness of the rapid economic growth of the 1990s that may have played a role in Argentinas ultimate inability to escape the crisis that started to unfold towards the end of that decade. ; Economic Research Working Paper 0204
Working Paper
Inflation persistence and flexible prices
If the central bank follows an interest rate rule, then inflation is likely to be persistence, even when prices are fully flexible. Any shock, whether persistent or not, may lead to inflation persistence. In equilibrium, the dynamics of inflation are determined by the evolution of the spread between the real interest rate and the central bank?s target. Inflation persistence in U.S. data can be characterized by a vector autocorrelation function relating inflation and deviations of output from trend. This paper shows that a flexible-price general equilibrium business cycle model with money and ...
Working Paper
The nominal facts and the October 1979 policy change
Gavin and Kydland (1999) calculated the cyclical properties of money and prices for the periods before and after the October 1979 policy change. In this article, we extend that work by adding four more years of data and including a study of nominal interest rates and inflation. The adoption of a disinflation policy in October 1979 does not appear to have had a measurable impact on the cyclical properties of real variables. However, it made a dramatic difference in the cyclical properties of nominal variables. We also examine the covariance structure of several nominal relationships: the ...
Working Paper
Endogenous money supply and the business cycle
This paper documents changes in the cyclical behavior of nominal data series that appear after 1979:Q3 when the Federal Reserve implemented a policy to lower the inflation rate. Such changes were not apparent in real variables. A business cycle model with impulses to technology and a role for money is used to show how alternative money supply rules are expected to affect observed business cycle facts. In this model, changes in the money supply rules have almost no effect on the cyclical behavior of real variables, yet have a significant impact on the cyclical nature of nominal variables. ...
Journal Article
The nominal facts and the October 1979 policy change
Working Paper
Endogenous money supply and the business cycle
An empirical and theoretical analysis of how changes in the monetary policy function affect the covariance structure of macroeconomic data.