Search Results
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
Stopping inflations, big and small
Previous studies of disinflation work with models in which firms use time-dependent strategies, changing nominal prices at intervals of fixed length. These models may be criticized for failing to allow pricing behavior to adjust after a large shift in policy regime. Consequently, this paper develops a model that allows firms to adopt strategies that are partially state-dependent, changing nominal prices whenever they deviate sufficiently from their target values. The paper uses this model to examine how the welfare costs and benefits of disinflation vary with the initial inflation rate and ...
Journal Article
Price stability under long-run monetary targeting
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
The monetary transmission mechanism
The monetary transmission mechanism describes how policy-induced changes in the nominal money stock or the short-term nominal interest rate impact real variables such as aggregate output and employment. Specific channels of monetary transmission operate through the effects that monetary policy has on interest rates, exchange rates, equity and real estate prices, bank lending, and firm balance sheets. Recent research on the transmission mechanism seeks to understand how these channels work in the context of dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium models.
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 ...
Working Paper
Customer flows, countercyclical markups, and the persistent effects of monetary shocks
This paper develops a general equilibrium model in which households face fixed costs associated with searching for a new supplier of consumption goods. These search costs provide firms with some monopoly power over their existing customers and generate the kind of customer flow dynamics first considered by Phelps and Winter. Customer flows, in turn, cause markups of price over marginal cost to vary countercyclically, both amplify and propagate the effects of technology shocks on output, and allow the effects of monetary shocks on output to persist.
Journal Article
Two perspectives on growth and taxes
Journal Article
Commentary on \\"Monetary policy as equilibrium selection\\"