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Working Paper
Inflation and real activity with firm-level productivity shocks
In the last ten years there has been an explosion of empirical work examining price setting behavior at the micro level. The work has in turn challenged existing macro models that attempt to explain monetary nonneutrality, because these models are generally at odds with much of the micro price data. In response, economists have developed a second generation of sticky-price models that are state dependent and that include both fixed costs of price adjustment and idiosyncratic shocks. Nonetheless, some ambiguity remains about the extent of monetary nonneutrality that can be attributed to costly ...
Working Paper
Monetary policy, secrecy, and federal funds rate behavior
The behavior of the Federal Reserve System can be characterized as secretive with respect to its control of monetary aggregates. One common justification for this secrecy is that markets will overreact to information, causing undue variability in interest rates. However, the consequences of keeping policy objectives hidden has received little formal attention. This paper takes an initial step by examining the variability of the federal funds rate and total reserves under nonborrowed reserve targeting. The major result is that the disclosure of operating procedures will generally increase the ...
Journal Article
Implementation of optimal monetary policy
Journal Article
Was the disinflation of the early 1980's anticipated?
Working Paper
Structure from shocks
Arguments in favor of Keynesian models as opposed to real business cycle models are often made on the grounds that the correlations and impulse response patterns found in the latter are inconsistent with the data. A recent and prominent example of this reasoning is Gali (1999). But certain conclusions involve a certain joint hypothesis that implicitly assumes a certain characterization of monetary policy. This paper shows just how crucial the systematic portion of monetary policy is for interpreting many of the correlations and impulse response functions emphasized in the literature. ...
Working Paper
Do Phillips curves conditionally help to forecast inflation?
This paper reexamines the forecasting ability of Phillips curves from both an unconditional and conditional perspective by applying the method developed by Giacomini and White (2006). We find that forecasts from our Phillips curve models tend to be unconditionally inferior to those from our univariate forecasting models. We also find, however, that conditioning on the state of the economy sometimes does improve the performance of the Phillips curve model in a statistically significant manner. When we do find improvement, it is asymmetric -- Phillips curve forecasts tend to be more accurate ...
Journal Article
Investing in equities: can it help social security?
Working Paper
The effects of fiscal policy in a neoclassical growth model
This paper studies the effects of fiscal policies--depicted as stochastic changes in government spending and distortionary tax rates--when the government is constrained from using lump sum taxes for achieving intertemporal budget balance. The ratio of debt to gnp, therefore, has consequences for the future choices of government spending and distortionary taxation and hence affects real economic activity. Further modeling fiscal policy in this way generates results that differ substantially from those in standard stochastic models where lump sum taxes are used for budget balance. The modeling ...
Journal Article
M2 and monetary policy: a critical review of the recent debate