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Working Paper
On the implementation of Markov-perfect interest rate and money supply rules: global and local uniqueness
Currently there is a growing literature exploring the features of optimal monetary policy in New Keynesian models under both commitment and discretion. This literature usually solves for the optimal allocations that are consistent with a rational expectations market equilibrium, but it does not study how the policy can be implemented given the available policy instruments. Recently, however, King and Wolman (2004) have shown that a time-consistent policy cannot be implemented through the control of nominal money balances. In particular, they find that equilibria are not unique under a money ...
Journal Article
Evolving inflation dynamics and the New Keynesian Phillips curve
Working Paper
Productivity, employment, and inventories
Marshall made at least four contributions to the classical quantity theory. He endowed it with his Cambridge cash-balance money-supply-and-demand framework to explain how the nominal money supply relative to real money demand determines the price level. He combined it with the assumption of purchasing power parity to explain (i) the international distribution of world money under metallic standards and fixed exchange rates, and (ii) exchange rate determination under floating rates and inconvertible paper currencies. He paired it with the idea of money wage and/or interest rate stickiness in ...
Journal Article
Monetary policy with interest on reserves
Since the fall of 2008, the amount of outstanding reserves on the Federal Reserve's balance sheet has increased from about 100 billion dollars to more than 1 trillion dollars. There is some concern that the magnitude of outstanding reserves might affect the ability of the Federal Reserve to conduct monetary policy through an interest rate policy. In this article I argue that the ability of the Federal Reserve to pay interest on reserves, also introduced in the fall of 2008, should lessen this concern. For an appropriately modified baseline model of money, I show that, with the payment of ...
Briefing
Was There a Better Way to Contain COVID-19?
Many countries resorted to social distancing as a first response to contain the spread of COVID-19. Arguably, social distancing measures caused major disruptions of the economy. Targeted interventions — such as more effective quarantine, contact tracing and random testing — may have had less harmful economic outcomes and more effective containment of COVID-19.
Working Paper
What is the real story for interest rate volatility?
What is the source of interest rate volatility? Why do low interest rates precede business cycle booms? Most observers tend to assume that monetary policy is largely responsible for it. Indeed, a standard real business cycle model delivers rather small fluctuations in real interest rates. Here, however, we present two models of the real business cycle variety in which real rate fluctuations are of similar magnitude as in the data, while simultaneously matching salient business cycle facts. The second model also replicates the cyclical behavior of real interest rates. The models build on ...
Working Paper
Vintage capital as an origin of inequalities
Working Paper
Can a matching model explain the long-run increase in Canada's unemployment rate?
We construct a simple general equilibrium model of unemployment and calibrate it to the Canadian economy. Job creation and destruction are endogenous. In this model, we consider several potential factors which could contribute to the long-run increase in the Canadian unemployment rate: a more generous unemployment insurance system, higher layoff costs, higher distortionary taxes, and a slower rate of productivity growth. We find that in the model economy the impact of all of these factors on the unemployment rate is small.
Journal Article
Generalized Matching Functions and Resource Utilization Indices for the Labor Market
In the U.S. labor market, unemployed individuals who are actively looking for work are more than three times as likely to become employed than those individuals who are not actively looking for work and are considered to be out of the labor force (OLF). Yet, on average, every month twice as many people make the transition from OLF to employment than make the transition from unemployment to employment. Based on these observations, we have argued in Hornstein, Kudlyak, and Lange (2014) for an alternative measure of resource utilization in the labor market, a nonemployment index (NEI), that is ...