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Journal Article
The government's role in deposit insurance
Working Paper
A welfare rationale for multiple reserve requirements
Working Paper
Are there optimal multiple reserve requirements?
A number of developing countries have adopted deficit-finance regimes involving multiple reserve requirements. One question the previous literature on this phenomenon has not addressed is whether multiple-reserves regimes can improve on regimes involving single-currency-reserve requirements if the policy settings of the latter regimes are assumed to be chosen optimally. We find that a "conventional" multiple-reserves regime--a regime with positive nominal rates on reservable bonds--cannot Pareto-improve an optimal single-currency-regime but can, in some cases, increase social welfare over ...
Working Paper
Monetary steady states in a low real interest rate economy
We study the properties of an overlapping generations model with many-period-lived agents, neoclassical production and capital accumulation, labor-leisure decisions, population growth, and technological progress. We demonstrate that a plausibly calibrated version of this model has "monetary steady states" -Samuelson-case steady states with large real stocks of unbacked government debt. These steady states can duplicate a number of important features of U.S. postwar data, including three phenomena that challenge other sorts of calibrated models: the low average real interest rate on U.S. ...
Working Paper
Stability of steady states in a model of pleasant monetarist arithmetic
In this paper the authors study the stability properties of the alternative steady-state equilibria that arise in a neoclassical production model that delivers pleasant monetarist arithmetic. They show that if the government?s monetary policy rule involves a fixed money supply growth rate, then ?pleasant arithmetic? steady states?steady states from which a permanent increase in the money growth and inflation rates is associated with a permanent decrease in the real interest rate and a permanent increase in the level of output?are dynamically stable.
Journal Article
The U.S. currency system: a historical perspective
Journal Article
Fully funded social security: Now you see it, now you don't?
Governments of countries around the world, including the United States, are considering implementing social security reform programs. In most cases, one of the principal goals of the reform program is to convert a pay-as-you-go social security system into a fully funded system. Most economists believe that the long-run macroeconomic benefits of a successful transition to a fully funded system are likely to be large relative to the benefits from social security reforms of other types. ; The authors of this article describe the basic differences between pay-as-you-go and fully funded systems ...
Journal Article
How costly is sustained low inflation for the U.S. economy?
The authors study the welfare cost of inflation in a general equilibrium life-cycle model that includes households that live for many periods, production and capital, simple monetary and financial sectors, and a fairly elaborate government sector. The government?s taxation of capital income is not indexed for inflation. They find that a plausibly calibrated version of this model has a steady state that matches a variety of facts about the postwar U.S. economy. They use the model to estimate the welfare cost of permanent, policy-induced changes in the inflation rate and find that most of the ...