Search Results
Journal Article
M2 and monetary policy: a critical review of the recent debate
Working Paper
Do Phillips curves conditionally help to forecast inflation?
The Phillips curve has long been used as a foundation for forecasting inflation. Yet numerous studies indicate that over the past 20 years or so, inflation forecasts based on the Phillips curve generally do not predict inflation any better than a univariate forecasting model. In this paper, the authors take a deeper look at the forecasting ability of Phillips curves from both an unconditional and a conditional view. Namely, they use the test results developed by Giacomini and White (2006) to examine the forecasting ability of Phillips curve models. The authors' main results indicate that ...
Working Paper
Inflation uncertainty and growth in a simple monetary model
This paper analyzes the effects of inflation variability on economic growth in a model where money is introduced via a cash-in-advance constraint. In this setting, we find that inflation adversely affects long-run growth, even when the cash-in-advance constraint applies only to consumption. At the same time, we find that inflation and growth are positively related in the short-run. In addition, variability tends to increase average growth through a precautionary savings motive. Since inflation and inflation variability tend to be highly correlated, this latter effect attenuates the negative ...
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 ...
Working Paper
The effects of fiscal policy in a neoclassical growth model
This paper studies the effects of fiscal policies--depicted as stochastic changes in government spending and distortionary tax rates--when the government cannot use lump sum taxes to achieve intertemporal budget balance. This framework contrasts the more standard analysis in which spending and taxes follow exogenous Markov process and where lump sum taxation is used to balance the government's budget. Although we also model tax rates and spending as following Markov processes, the transition probabilities of these processes depend on the ration of government debt to gnp. The ratio of debt to ...
Journal Article
The foreign trade deficit eludes the J-curve
Journal Article
Where Is Everybody? The Shrinking Labor Force Participation Rate
More Americans are neither working nor looking for work. What is going on?
Working Paper
Demographic Transition, Industrial Policies and Chinese Economic Growth
We build a unified framework to quantitatively examine the demographic transition and industrial policies in contributing to China’s economic growth between 1976 and 2015. We find that the demographic transition and industrial policy changes by themselves account for a large fraction of the rise in household and corporate savings relative to total output and the rise in the country’s per capita output growth. Importantly, their interactions also lead to a sizable fraction of the increases in savings since the late 1980s and reduce growth after 2010. A novel and important factor that ...
Working Paper
Investigating Nonneutrality in a State-Dependent Pricing Model with Firm-Level Productivity Shocks
In recent years there has been an abundance of empirical work examining price setting behavior at the micro level. First generation models with price setting rigidities were generally at odds with much of the micro price data. A second generation of models, with fixed costs of price adjustment and idiosyncratic shocks, have attempted to rectify this shortcoming. Using a model that matches a large set of microeconomic facts we find significant nonneutrality. We decompose the nonneutrality and find that state-dependence plays an important part in the responses of output and inflation to a ...