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Working Paper
Irrational expectations and econometric practice: discussion of Orphanides and Williams, \"Inflation scares and forecast-based monetary policy\"
Athanasios Orphanides and John C. Williams' excellent conference paper, "Inflation Scares and Forecast-Based Monetary Policy," contributes importantly to the new and rapidly growing branch of the literature on bounded rationality and learning in macroeconomics. Their paper, like many others, derives interesting and useful theoretical results that show how the introduction of bounded rationality and learning impacts on the effects of monetary policy shocks and the characteristics of optimal monetary policy rules. This note suggests that some additional empirical work-some "irrational ...
Working Paper
Endogenous financial innovation and the demand for money
This paper embeds two key ideas about the nature of financial innovation taken from the empirical literature into a familiar equilibrium monetary model. It provides formal support for several alternative econometric specifications for money demand that attempt to capture the effects of financial innovation and demonstrates that a popular theoretical model of money demand, when suitably modified, can account for some unusual monetary dynamics found in the data. Thus, it helps to establish both the theoretical relevance of recent empirical work and the empirical relevance of recent theoretical ...
Working Paper
Optimal disinflationary paths
This paper characterizes optimal monetary policy in the context of a general equilibrium model with optimizing agents and staggered price setting. Starting from a steady state with positive inflation, a rapid disinflation is desirable when announcements of future monetary policy are fully credible. Disinflationary policy yields substantial losses in output and employment when the monetary authority lacks credibility; nevertheless, the benefits of disinflation still exceed the costs. Disinflation often fails to be welfare-improving, however, when lost seignorage revenues must be replaced using ...
Conference Paper
Stopping inflations, big and small
Journal Article
Using the permanent income hypothesis for forecasting
Journal Article
Price stability under long-run monetary targeting
Working Paper
The liquidity trap, the real balance effect, and the Friedman rule
This paper studies the behavior of the economy and the efficacy of monetary policy under zero nominal interest rates, using a model with population growth that nests, as a special case, a more conventional specification in which there is a single infinitely lived representative agent. The paper shows that with a growing population, monetary policy has distributional effects that give rise to a real balance effect, thereby eliminating the liquidity trap. These same distributional effects, however, can also work to make many agents much worse off under zero nominal interest rates than they are ...
Working Paper
Money and the gain from enduring relationships in the turnpike model
This paper presents a stochastic version of Townsend's turnpike model in which the aggregate endowment is distributed randomly between two sets of agents and in which agents of each type are allowed to remain at a trading post for multiple periods. Agents use money as a means of exchange when they meet as strangers but use private securities when they remain paired at the same trading post. Both welfare and the income velocity of money increase monotonically with the length of the trading session.
Working Paper
Implementing the Friedman rule
In cash-in-advance models, necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of an equilibrium with zero nominal interest rates and Pareto-optimal allocations restrict only the very long-run, or asymptotic, behavior of the money supply. When these asymptotic conditions are satisfied, they leave the central bank with a great deal of flexibility to manage the money supply over any finite horizon. But what happens when these asymptotic conditions fail to hold? This paper shows that the central bank can still implement the Friedman rule if its actions are appropriately constrained in the ...
Journal Article
Forecasting the effects of reduced defense spending
Forecasts from a vector autoregressive model indicate that the substantial cuts in defense spending proposed by the Bush Administration in 1991 are likely to reduce GNP in both the short run and the long run. These forecasts hold even if proceeds from the spending cuts are used to reduce the federal debt. The long-range VAR forecasts, in particular, contrast markedly with those of the large-scale econometric models employed by the Congressional Budget Office.