Search Results
Journal Article
How the U.S. Treasury should auction its debt
The U.S. Treasury could raise more revenue if it changed the way it auctions its debt. Under the current procedure, all bidders whose competitive bids for Treasury securities are accepted pay the prices they bid; different winning bidders, that is, pay different prices. Instead, economic theory says, all winning bidders should all pay the same price?that of the highest bid not accepted, or the price that just clears the market. This procedural change would increase the revenue that Treasury auctions raise primarily because it would decrease the amount of resources that bidders would spend ...
Report
Bailouts, time inconsistency, and optimal regulation
We develop a model in which, in order to provide managerial incentives, it is optimal to have costly bankruptcy. If benevolent governments can commit to their policies, it is optimal not to interfere with private contracts. Such policies are time inconsistent in the sense that, without commitment, governments have incentives to bail out firms by buying up the debt of distressed firms and renegotiating their contracts with managers. From an ex ante perspective, however, such bailouts are costly because they worsen incentives and thereby reduce welfare. We show that regulation in the form of ...
Conference Paper
Optimal fiscal and monetary policy: some recent results
Journal Article
Inflation, growth, and financial intermediation
Report
Seasonalities in security returns: the case of earnings announcements
An examination of the behavior of stock returns around quarterly earnings announcement dates finds a seasonal pattern: small firms show large positive abnormal returns and a sizable increase in the variability of returns around these dates. Only part of the large abnormal returns can be accounted for by the fact that firms with good news tend to announce early. Large firms show no abnormal returns around announcement dates and a much smaller increase in variability.
Journal Article
The growth effects of monetary policy
This article investigates the relationship between inflation and output, in the data and in standard models. The article reports that empirical cross-country studies generally find a nonlinear, negative relationship between inflation and output, a relationship that standard models cannot come close to reproducing. The article demonstrates that the models' problem may be due to their standard narrow assumption that all money is held by the public for making transactions. When the models are adjusted to also assume that banks are required to hold money, the models do a much better job. The ...
Report
The Role of Uncertainty and Risk in Climate Change Economics
This chapter is an introductory essay to the volume Climate Change Economics: The Role of Uncertainty and Risk, edited by V. V. Chari and Robert Litterman. This volume consists of a collection of papers that were presented at "The Next Generation of Economic Models of Climate Change," a conference hosted by the Heller-Hurwicz Economics Institute at the University of Minnesota.
Report
Time consistency and policy
Discussion Paper
Reforming the European Monetary Union
We offer a theoretically based narrative that attempts to account both for the formation of the European Monetary Union (EMU) and for the challenges it has faced. Lack of commitment to policy plays a central role in this narrative and leads to four policy implications for EMU redesign.