Search Results
Discussion Paper
On the Ethics of Redistribution
Analysts of optimal policy often advocate for redistributive policies within developed economies using a behind-the-veil-of-ignorance criterion. Such analyses almost invariably ignore the effects of these policies on the well-being of people in poor countries. We argue that this approach is fundamentally misguided because it violates the criterion itself.
Report
On the optimal choice of a monetary policy instrument
The optimal choice of a monetary policy instrument depends on how tight and transparent the available instruments are and on whether policymakers can commit to future policies. Tightness is always desirable; transparency is only if policymakers cannot commit. Interest rates, which can be made endogenously tight, have a natural advantage over money growth and exchange rates, which cannot. As prices, interest and exchange rates are more transparent than money growth. All else equal, the best instrument is interest rates and the next-best, exchange rates. These findings are consistent with the ...
Discussion Paper
Thoughts on the Federal Reserve System's exit strategy
How can banks and similar institutions design optimal compensation systems? Would such systems conflict with the goals of society? This paper considers a theoretical framework of how banks structure job contracts with their employees to explore three points: the structure of a socially optimal compensation system; the structure of a compensation system that is privately optimal, given the reality of government-guaranteed bank debt; and policy interventions that can lead from the second structure to the first. Analysis reveals a potential policy option: providing proper incentives to banks by ...
Conference Paper
Hysteresis in unemployment - comments
Larry Ball's paper contains two basic ideas. The first is a second generation Phillips Curve which relates changes in inflation to the level of the unemployment rate and the second is the idea that monetary policy has extremely persistent effects on the unemployment rate, well beyond effects over the business cycle.
Discussion Paper
Financial Repression: Evidence and Theory
?Financial repression??policies that allow a government to place its debt with financial institutions at relatively low interest rates?has been used widely for centuries. This essay focuses on one important form of repression: requiring financial intermediaries to hold more government bonds than they would if policies didn?t require it. We argue that this policy should only be used when the government has an urgent need to issue debt and has difficulty issuing new debt because of potential lender doubts about the government?s ability to repay. {{p}} This research suggests that policies that ...
Working Paper
Expectation traps and monetary policy
Why is it that inflation is persistently high in some periods and persistently low in other periods? We argue that lack of commitment in monetary policy may bear a large part of the blame. We show that, in a standard equilibrium model, absence of commitment leads to multiple equilibria, or expectation traps. In these traps, expectations of high or low inflation lead the public to take defensive actions which then make it optimal for the monetary authority to validate those expectations. We find support in cross-country evidence for key implications of the model.
Journal Article
Time consistency and optimal policy design
Working Paper
Financialization in Commodity Markets
The financialization view is that increased trading in commodity futures markets is associated with increases in the growth rate and volatility of commodity spot prices. This view gained credence because in the 2000s trading volume increased sharply and many commodity prices rose and became more volatile. Using a large panel dataset we constructed, which includes commodities with and without futures markets, we find no empirical link between increased futures market trading and changes in price behavior. Our data sheds light on the economic role of futures markets. The conventional view is ...
Report
International coordination of fiscal policy in limiting economies
We examine the limiting behavior of cooperative and noncooperative fiscal policies as countries? market power goes to zero. We show that these policies converge if countries raise revenues through lump-sum taxation. However, if there are unremovable domestic distortions, such as distorting taxes, there can be gains to coordination even when a single country?s policy cannot affect world prices. These results differ from the received wisdom in the optimal tariff literature. The key distinction is that, unlike in the tariff literature, the spending decisions of governments are explicitly modeled.
Report
Optimal fiscal and monetary policy
We provide an introduction to optimal fiscal and monetary policy using the primal approach to optimal taxation. We use this approach to address how fiscal and monetary policy should be set over the long run and over the business cycle. We find four substantive lessons for policymaking: Capital income taxes should be high initially and then roughly zero; tax rates on labor and consumption should be roughly constant; state-contingent taxes on assets should be used to provide insurance against adverse shocks; and monetary policy should be conducted so as to keep nominal interest rates close to ...