Search Results
Journal Article
Alternative monetary constitutions and the quest for price stability
This article reviews the various means through which governments and central banks have sought to guarantee long-run price stability. Finn Kydland and Mark Wynne argue that monetary regimes or standards can all be viewed as more or less successful attempts to overcome the well-known time-consistency problem in monetary policy. The classical gold standard, which prevailed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, can be interpreted as a monetary policy rule that delivered long-run price stability. The fiat monetary standard adopted by countries following the abandonment of gold ...
Working Paper
Checking the Path Towards Recovery from the COVID-19 Isolation Response
This paper examines the impact of the behavioral changes and governments' responses to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic using a unique dataset of daily private forecasters' expectations on a sample of 32 emerging and advanced economies from January 1 till April 13, 2020. We document three important lessons from the data: First, there is evidence of a relation between the stringency of the policy interventions and the health outcomes consistent with slowing down the spread of the pandemic. Second, we find robust evidence that private forecasters have come to anticipate a sizeable ...
Working Paper
Monetary policy, the tax code, and the real effects of energy shocks
This paper develops a monetary model with taxes to account for the apparently asymmetric and time-varying effects of energy shocks on output and hours worked in post-World War II U.S. data. In our model, the real effects of an energy shock are amplified when the monetary authority responds to that shock by changing its inflation objective. Specifically, higher inflation raises households? nominal capital gains taxes since those taxes are not indexed to inflation. The increase in taxes behaves as a negative wealth effect and generates an immediate decline in output, investment, and hours ...
Working Paper
Monetary aggregates and output
This paper offers a general equilibrium model that explains how the observed correlations of money and output fluctuations may come about through endogenously determined fluctuations in the money multiplier. The model is calibrated to meet long-run (including monetary) features of the U.S. economy; it is then subjected to shocks to the Solow residual following a random process similar to that observed in U.S. data.
Journal Article
The inflation-output variability tradeoff and price-level targets
In this article, the authors describe a popular monetary policy framework based on a neoclassical Phillips Curve model. Here, the choice between an inflation target and a price-level target depends on characteristics of real output. If the output gap is relatively persistent, then targeting the price level results in a better set of policy options for the central bank. The authors present evidence from the G-10 countries showing that conventionally measured output gaps are highly persistent. The policy implication of assuming rational expectations and this Phillips Curve model is that central ...
Working Paper
Nominal rigidities in debt and product markets
Standard models used for monetary policy analysis rely on sticky prices. Recently, the literature started to explore also nominal debt contracts. Focusing on mortgages, this paper compares the two channels of transmission within a common framework. The sticky price channel is dominant when shocks to the policy interest rate are temporary, the mortgage channel is important when the shocks are persistent. The first channel has significant aggregate effects but small redistributive effects. The opposite holds for the second channel. Using yield curve data decomposed into temporary and persistent ...
Working Paper
Fiscal sentiment and the weak recovery from the Great Recession: a quantitative exploration
The U.S. economy isn' t recovering from the deep Great Recession of 2008?2009 with the strength predicted by models that incorporate a variety of shocks and frictions in the basic analytical framework of the neoclassical growth model. It has been argued that the counterfactual predictions shouldn 't be attributed to inherent features of that framework, but to the omission from the analysis of the prospects of an imminent switch to a higher taxes regime prompted by the unprecedented fiscal challenges faced by the U.S. economy in peacetime. The paper explores quantitatively this fiscal ...
Working Paper
The gold standard as a rule
In this paper, we show that the monetary rule followed by a number of key countries before 1914 represented a commitment technology preventing the monetary authorities from changing planned future policy. The experiences of these major countries suggest that the gold standard was intended as a contingent rule. By that, we mean that the authorities could temporarily abandon the fixed price of gold during a wartime emergency on the understanding that convertibility at the original price of gold would be restored when the emergency passed.
Working Paper
Home production meets time-to-build
An innovation in this paper is to introduce a time-to-build technology for the production of market capital into a model with home production. The paper?s main finding is that the two anomalies that have plagued all household production models?the positive correlation between business and household investment, and household investment leading business investment over the business cycle?are resolved when time-to-build is added.
Conference Paper
Macroeconomic implications