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Journal Article
Budget deficits and interest rates
Journal Article
Friedman and Taylor on monetary policy rules: a comparison
The names Milton Friedman and John Taylor are associated with different monetary policy rules; but, as shown in this paper, the difference between their perceptions of how the economy works is not great. The monetary policy rules advanced by Taylor and Friedman are compared by linking the rules to the two economists' underlying views about nominal rigidity, the source of trade-offs, the sources of shocks, and model uncertainty. Taylor and Friedman both emphasized Phillips curve specifications that impose temporary nominal price rigidity and the long-run natural-rate restriction; and they ...
Working Paper
Karl Brunner and U.K. Monetary Debate
Although he was based in the United States, leading monetarist Karl Brunner participated in debates in the United Kingdom on monetary analysis and policy from the 1960s to the 1980s. During the 1960s, his participation in the debates was limited to research papers, but in the 1970s, as monetarism attracted national attention, Brunner made contributions to U.K. media discussions. In the pre-1979 period, he was highly critical of the U.K. authorities? nonmonetary approach to the analysis and control of inflation-an approach supported by leading U.K. Keynesians. In the early 1980s, Brunner had ...
Journal Article
Milton Friedman and U.S. monetary history: 1961-2006
This paper, using extensive archival material from several countries, brings together scattered information about Milton Friedman's views and predictions regarding U.S. monetary policy developments after 1960 (i.e., the period beyond that covered by his and Anna Schwartz's Monetary History of the United States). The author evaluates these interpretations and predictions in light of subsequent events.
Journal Article
Paul Samuelson and monetary analysis
Working Paper
Seven Fallacies Concerning Milton Friedman's \"The Role of Monetary Policy\"
This paper analyzes Milton Friedman's (1968) article "The Role of Monetary Policy," via a discussion of seven fallacies concerning the article. These fallacies are: (1) "The Role of Monetary Policy" was Friedman?s first public statement of the natural rate hypothesis. (2) The Friedman-Phelps Phillips curve was already presented in Samuelson and Solow's (1960) analysis. (3) Friedman's specification of the Phillips curve was based on perfect competition and no nominal rigidities. (4) Friedman?s (1968) account of monetary policy in the Great Depression contradicted the Monetary History's ...
Working Paper
Trend inflation in advanced economies
We derive estimates of trend inflation for fourteen advanced economies from a framework in which trend shocks exhibit stochastic volatility. The estimated specification allows for time-variation in the degree to which longer-term inflation expectations are well anchored in each economy. Our results bring out the effect of changes in monetary regime (such as the adoption of inflation targeting in several countries) on the behavior of trend inflation. Our estimates expand on the previous literature in several dimensions: For each country, we employ a multivariate approach that pools different ...
Working Paper
The Monetary Base in Allan Meltzer's Analytical Framework
This analysis of Allan Meltzer?s analytical framework focuses on the role that Meltzer assigned to the monetary base. For many years, Meltzer suggested that central banks should use the monetary base as their policy instrument, in place of a short-term nominal interest rate. However, he recognized that in practice central banks did not follow this prescription. He believed that the monetary base could play an important role even when an interest rate was used as the instrument. Meltzer?s reasoning was twofold: (i) The monetary base might shed light on the behavior of important asset prices ...
Journal Article
The great recapitalization
Journal Article
An estimated DSGE model for the United Kingdom
The authors estimate the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Evans (2005) on U.K. data. Their estimates suggest that price stickiness is a more important source of nominal rigidity in the United Kingdom than wage stickiness. Their estimates of parameters governing investment behavior are only well behaved when post-1979 observations are included, which reflects government policies until the late 1970s that obstructed the influence of market forces on investment.