Search Results
Journal Article
Financial deregulation, monetary policy, and central banking
The paper analyzes the need for financial regulations in the implementation of central bank policy. It emphasizes that a central bank serves two functions. Central banks function as monetary authorities, managing high-powered money to influence the price level and real activity; and they engage in regular and emergency lending to financial institutions. The authors term these functions monetary and banking policies, respectively. They emphasize that regulations are not essential for the execution of monetary policy because high-powered money can be managed with open market operations in ...
Journal Article
Reexamining the monetarist critique of interest rate rules
Monetarist economists argued long ago that central bank interest rate rules exacerbate macroeconomic fluctuations, essentially by not allowing the interest rate to respond promptly to shifts in the supply and demand for loans. To support this critique, they pointed to the procyclicality of the money stock. Yet, when there are real shocks and a real business cycle, modern macroeconomic models imply that some procyclicality of money is desirable, to stabilize the price level. A simple interest rate rule illustrates that the monetarist critique can be valid within this model, since the rule ...
Journal Article
The new IS-LM model : language, logic, and limits
Discussion Paper
Productive externalities and business cycles
This paper begins with the observation that the volatility of factor input growth is insufficient to explain the volatility in the growth rate of output, and explores the empirical plausibility of the hypothesis that this fact is due to the presence of productive externalities and increasing returns to scale. We construct a quantitative equilibrium macroeconomic model which incorporates these features, and allows for demand shocks operating at the level of the consumer. We employ the method of Hall (1986) and Parkin (1988) to measure these demand shocks, and use these measured disturbances to ...
Working Paper
The case for price stability
Reasoning within the New Neoclassical Synthesis (NNS) we previously recommended that price stability should be the primary objective of monetary policy. We called this a neutral policy because it keeps output at its potential, defined as the outcome of an imperfectly competitive real business cycle model with a constant markup of price over marginal cost. We explore the foundations of neutral policy more fully in this paper. Using the principles of public finance, we derive conditions under which markup constancy is optimal monetary policy. ; Price stability as the primary policy objective ...
Journal Article
Rational expectations business cycle models: a survey
Development of rational expectations models of the business cycle has been the central issue in macroeconomics over the last 15 years. The postulate that expectations are rational imposes considerable discipline on business cycle analysis. In this essay we review the current literature on rational expectations models of business cycles with specific attention focused on the extent to which the rational expectations perspective has generated a new understanding of economic fluctuations.
Conference Paper
Money and business cycles
Working Paper
The pitfalls of monetary discretion
In a canonical staggered pricing model, monetary discretion leads to multiple private sector equilibria. The basis for multiplicity is a form of policy complementarity. Specifically, prices set in the current period embed expectations about future policy, and actual future policy responds to these same prices. For a range of values of the fundamental state variable ? a ratio of predetermined prices ? there is complementarity between actual and expected policy, and multiple equilibria occur. Moreover, this multiplicity is not associated with reputational considerations: it occurs in a ...