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Working Paper
Consumer attitudes and business cycles
Journal Article
Assessing simple policy rules: A view from a complete macroeconomic model
Monetary policy analysts looking for a model on which to base decisions may consider two popular approaches-the New Keynesian (NK) and the identified vector autoregression (VAR) approaches. Choosing between the two can be difficult: NK models are stylized and have simple rules while structural VAR models have complex dynamics and loose behavioral interpretations. ; The simpler NK models often produce stark conclusions. For example, NK analyses consistently find that the Federal Reserve's monetary policy has improved markedly in the past two decades compared with the 1960s and 1970s. In ...
Working Paper
Modest policy interventions
The authors present a theoretical and empirical framework for computing and evaluating linear projections conditional on hypothetical paths of monetary policy. A modest policy intervention does not significantly shift agents' beliefs about policy regime and does not induce the changes in behavior that Lucas (1976) emphasizes. Applied to an econometric model of U.S. monetary policy, the authors find that a rich class of interventions routinely considered by the Federal Reserve is modest and their impacts can be reliably forecast by an identified linear model. Modest interventions can shift ...
Working Paper
Recovery of 1933
When Roosevelt abandoned the gold standard in April 1933, he converted government debt from a tax-backed claim to gold to a claim to dollars, opening the door to unbacked fiscal expansion. Roosevelt followed a state-contingent fiscal rule that ran nominal-debt-financed primary deficits until the price level rose and economic activity recovered. Theory suggests that government spending multipliers can be substantially larger when fiscal expansions are unbacked than when they are tax-backed. VAR estimates using data on "emergency" unbacked spending and "ordinary" backed spending confirm this ...
Journal Article
Reducing our ignorance about monetary policy effects
Business news often gives the impression that the effects of monetary policy on the macroeconomy are well understood and predictable. The author of this article, however, believes that, far from sharing such certainty, policymakers and economists alike have knowledge limited by difficulties in sorting out causal factors in economic data. He holds that monetary policy effects are neither well understood nor easily predicted. ; The article presents five models of private and monetary policy behavior in the United States. Identical policy experiments--an unanticipated one-time monetary policy ...
Journal Article
Consumer attitudes: king for a day