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Working Paper
Current Federal Reserve Policy Under the Lens of Economic History: A Review Essay
This review essay is intended as a critical review of Humpage (2015), and it expands on the issues raised in that volume. Federal Reserve Policy during the financial crisis, and in its aftermath are addressed, along with the relationship to historical experience in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world.
Conference Paper
Payment systems with random matching and private information
Journal Article
New Keynesian economics : a monetary perspective
In this article we construct a simple analytically tractable model to explore and evaluate New Keynesian ideas. First, we show that a New Keynesian model need not exhibit Phillips curve correlations in the absence of strategic price setting by firms. Second, we conclude that New Keynesian economics needlessly neglects monetary frictions and misses out on some key insights in the process. For example, it is important to understand how the central bank should manipulate monetary quantities to support particular nominal interest rate rules
Journal Article
Monetary policy in the United States: a brave new world?
This article is a reflection on monetary policy in the United States during Ben Bernanke?s two terms as Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee, from 2006 to 2014. Inflation targeting, policy during the financial crisis, and post-crisis monetary policy (forward guidance and quantitative easing) are discussed and evaluated.
Working Paper
Money and dynamic credit arrangements with private information
The authors construct a model with private information in which consumers write dynamic contracts with financial intermediaries.
Journal Article
Is Bitcoin a Waste of Resources?
Do Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies play a useful social role, or do they represent a social waste? Bitcoin is a decentralized recordkeeping system, with updating of the record of transactions in the blockchain.
Journal Article
Inflation Control: Do Central Bankers Have It Right?
Neo-Fisherites argue that conventional central banking wisdom has inflation control wrong, in that the way to increase (reduce) inflation is to increase (reduce) the central bank?s nominal interest rate target.
Working Paper
Scarcity of Safe Assets, Inflation, and the Policy Trap
We construct a model in which all consolidated government debt is used in transactions, with money being more widely acceptable. When asset market constraints bind, the model can deliver low real interest rates and positive rates of inflation at the zero lower bound. Optimal monetary policy in the face of a financial crisis shock implies a positive nominal interest rate. The model reveals some novel perils of Taylor rules.
Working Paper
Keynesian inefficiency and optimal policy: a new monetarist approach
A simple model of monetary/labor search is constructed to study Keynesian indeterminacy and optimal policy. In the model, economic agents have trouble splitting the surplus from exchange appropriately, and we consider monetary and fiscal policies that correct this Keynesian inefficiency. A Taylor rule does not imply determinacy, nor does it support an efficient outcome, in general. Optimal policies yield an efficient and determinate allocation of resources, but equilibrium policy actions, wages, and prices are indeterminate at the optimum.