Search Results
Journal Article
Monetary policy in the United States: a brave new world?
This article is a reflection on monetary policy in the United States during Ben Bernanke?s two terms as Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee, from 2006 to 2014. Inflation targeting, policy during the financial crisis, and post-crisis monetary policy (forward guidance and quantitative easing) are discussed and evaluated.
Working Paper
Money and dynamic credit arrangements with private information
The authors construct a model with private information in which consumers write dynamic contracts with financial intermediaries.
Journal Article
Is Bitcoin a Waste of Resources?
Do Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies play a useful social role, or do they represent a social waste? Bitcoin is a decentralized recordkeeping system, with updating of the record of transactions in the blockchain.
Journal Article
Inflation Control: Do Central Bankers Have It Right?
Neo-Fisherites argue that conventional central banking wisdom has inflation control wrong, in that the way to increase (reduce) inflation is to increase (reduce) the central bank?s nominal interest rate target.
Journal Article
Quantitative Easing: How Well Does This Tool Work?
Evaluating the effects of monetary policy is difficult, even in the case of conventional interest rate policy. With unconventional monetary policy, the difficulty is magnified, as the economic theory can be lacking, and there is a small amount of data available for empirical evaluation. With respect to QE, there are good reasons to be skeptical that it works as advertised, and some economists have made a good case that QE is actually detrimental.
Report
New Monetarist Economics: methods
This essay articulates the principles and practices of New Monetarism, our label for a recent body of work on money, banking, payments, and asset markets. We first discuss methodological issues distinguishing our approach from others: New Monetarism has something in common with Old Monetarism, but there are also important differences; it has little in common with Keynesianism. We describe the principles of these schools and contrast them with our approach. To show how it works, in practice, we build a benchmark New Monetarist model, and use it to study several issues, including the cost of ...
Report
Restrictions on financial intermediaries and implications for aggregate fluctuations: Canada and the United States, 1870-1913
We consider a production economy with a finite number of heterogeneous, infinitely lived consumers. We show that, if the economy is smooth enough, equilibria are locally unique for almost all endowments. We do so by converting the infinite-dimensional fixed point problem stated in terms of prices and commodities into a finite-dimensional Negishi problem involving individual weights in a social value function. By adding artificial fixed factors to utility and production functions, we can write the equilibrium conditions equating spending and income for each consumer entirely in terms of ...
Working Paper
Credit markets, limited commitment, and government debt
A dynamic model with credit under limited commitment is constructed, in which limited memory can weaken the effects of punishment for default. This creates an endogenous role for government debt in credit markets, and the economy can be non-Ricardian. Default can occur in equilibrium, and government debt essentially plays a role as collateral and thus improves borrowers? incentives. The provision of government debt acts to discourage default, whether default occurs in equilibrium or not.
Conference Paper
Do informational frictions justify federal credit programs?
Report
Barter and monetary exchange under private information
We analyze economies with private information concerning the quality of commodities. Without private information there is a nonmonetary equilibrium with only high quality commodities produced, and money cannot improve welfare. With private information there can be equilibria with bad quality commodities produced, and sometimes only nonmonetary equilibrium is degenerate. The use of money can lead to active (i.e., nondegenerate) equilibria when no active nonmonetary equilibrium exists. Even when active nonmonetary equilibria exist, with private information money can increase welfare via its ...