Search Results
Journal Article
Interest Rate Control Is More Complicated Than You Thought
Setting the fed funds rate is just one step. The Fed also has to deal with the discount rate and the interest rate paid on reserves. Throw in a floor system (with a subfloor!) and overnight reverse repos, and you?ve got a process that is anything but simple.
Report
Barter and monetary exchange under private information
We analyze economies with private information concerning the quality of commodities. Without private information there is a nonmonetary equilibrium with only high quality commodities produced, and money cannot improve welfare. With private information there can be equilibria with bad quality commodities produced, and sometimes only nonmonetary equilibrium is degenerate. The use of money can lead to active (i.e., nondegenerate) equilibria when no active nonmonetary equilibrium exists. Even when active nonmonetary equilibria exist, with private information money can increase welfare via its ...
Conference Paper
Payment systems with random matching and private information
Working Paper
Low Real Interest Rates and the Zero Lower Bound
How do low real interest rates constrain monetary policy? Is the zero lower bound optimal if the real interest rate is sufficiently low? What is the role of forward guidance? A model is constructed that can in- corporate sticky price frictions, collateral constraints, and conventional monetary distortions. The model has neo-Fisherian properties. Forward guidance in a liquidity trap works through the promise of higher future inflation, generated by a higher future nominal interest rate. With very tight collateral constraints, the real interest rate can be very low, but the zero lower bound ...
Working Paper
Scarce collateral, the term premium, and quantitative easing
A model of money, credit, and banking is constructed in which the differential pledgeability of collateral and the scarcity of collateralizable wealth lead to a term premium ? an upward-sloping nominal yield curve. Purchases of long-maturity government debt by the central bank are always a good idea, but for unconventional reasons. A floor system is preferred to a channel system, as a floor system permits welfare-improving asset purchases by the central bank.
Journal Article
New monetarist economics: methods
This essay articulates the principles and practices of New Monetarism, the authors' label for a recent body of work on money, banking, payments, and asset markets. They first discuss methodological issues distinguishing their approach from others: New Monetarism has something in common with Old Monetarism, but there are also important differences; it has little in common with Keynesianism. They describe the principles of these schools and contrast them with their approach. To show how it works in practice, they build a benchmark New Monetarist model and use it to study several issues, ...
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.
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.
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
Conference Paper
Private money