Search Results
Report
The jointly optimal inflation tax, income tax structure, and transfers
The welfare-maximizing income tax structure, rate of money creation, and amounts of intergenerational transfers are jointly determined for given rates of government consumption. When government consumption is zero, it is found for the parameter values examined that the income tax structure is progressive, the rate of money change is negative, and positive transfers are made to the old. As government consumption increases, the tax structure's progressivity declines and turns increasingly regressive, the rate of money change rises, and transfers decrease. It is found that the bulk of the ...
Journal Article
TIP: the wrong way to fight inflation
Journal Article
The right way to price Federal Reserve services
Report
The CBO's policy analysis: an unquestionable misuse of a questionable theory
The analyses of fiscal and monetary policies that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) provides Congress tend to be biased, encouraging the use of activist stabilization policies. The CBO?s virtual neglect of economic uncertainties and its emphasis on very short time horizons make active policies appear much more attractive than its own model implies. Moreover, the CBO?s adoption of the macroeconometric approach fundamentally biases its analyses. Macroeconometric models do not remain invariant to changes in policy rules and are mute on the implications of alternative policies for efficiency ...
Journal Article
A simple way to estimate current-quarter GNP
This paper describes a method developed to predict the advance (first) estimate of inflation-adjusted gross national product (real GNP) using hours-worked data. Besides generating fairly accurate forecasts of advance GNP, the method has two implications. First, the Commerce Department seems to weigh the hours-worked data most heavily in its early estimates of real GNP but less and less so in its revised estimates. Second, analysts attempting to predict current-quarter outcomes in real time need to consider the availability and reliability of data at the time the forecasts are made.
Report
How little we know about budget policy effects
Using a simple model, we show why previous empirical studies of budget policy effects are flawed. Due to an identification problem, those studies? findings can be shown to be consistent with either policies mattering or not.
Report
Income stability and economic efficiency under alternative tax schemes
Commodity money is modeled as one or two of the capital goods in a one-consumption good and one or two capital-good, overlapping generations model. Among the topics addressed using versions of the model are (i) the nature of the inefficiency of commodity money; (ii) the validity of quantity-theory predictions for commodity money systems; (iii) the circumstances under which one commodity emerges naturally as the commodity money; (iv) the role of inside money (money backed by private debt) in commodity money systems; and (v) the circumstances under which a government can choose the commodity to ...
Discussion Paper
Are banking supervisory data useful for macroeconomic forecasts?
Some argue that central banks can improve monetary policy by including confidential supervisory assessments of banking organizations in their forecasts of inflation and unemployment. In this study we examine the extent to which forecasts of these variables would have been improved with the inclusion of supervisory data. We begin by reproducing the earlier results used to support the claim. We critically examine them and extend the analysis from in-sample to out-of-sample testing. Finally, we check the robustness of our findings by extending the analysis period, using a different methodology ...
Report
The quantitative significance of the Lucas critique
Doan, Litterman, and Sims (DLS) have suggested using conditional forecasts to do policy analysis with Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) models. Their method seems to violate the Lucas critique, which implies that coefficients of a BVAR model will change when there is a change in policy rules. In this paper we construct a BVAR macro model and attempt to determine whether the Lucas critique is important quantitatively. We find evidence following two candidate policy rule changes of significant coefficient instability and of a deterioration in the performance of the DLS method.