The purpose of this paper is study the effect of monetary policy on asset prices. We study the properties of a monetary model in which a real asset is valued for its rate of return and for its liquidity. We show that money is essential if and only if real assets are scarce, in the precise sense that their supply is not sufficient to satisfy the demand for liquidity. Our model generates a clear ...

This paper examines the effects of inflation and currency substitution volatility on the average rates of inflation and currency substitution for twelve emerging market economies. Using a bivariate GARCH-in-Mean model, which accommodates for asymmetric and spillover effects of inflation and currency substitution innovations on their volatilities, we find that for the majority of the countries i...

In this paper, we characterize conditions under which interest rate feedback rules that set the nominal interest rate as an increasing function of the inflation rate induce aggregate instability by generating multiple equilibria. We show that these conditions depend not only on the monetaryfiscal regime (as emphasized in the fiscal theory of the price level) but also on the way in which money i...

A challenge to models of equilibrium indeterminacy based on increasing returns is that required increasing returns for generating indeterminacy can be implausibly large and rise quickly with the relative risk aversion in labor. We show that unsynchronized wage adjustment via a relative wage effect can both lower the required degree of increasing returns for indeterminacy to a plausible level an...

This paper estimates a time-varying AR-GARCH model of inflation producing measures of inflation uncertainty for the euro area, and investigates the linkages between them in a VAR framework, also allowing for the possible impact of the policy regime change associated with the start of EMU in 1999. The main findings are as follows. Steady-state inflation and inflation uncertainty have declined st...

This paper has two related goals: (i) construct a model where money and credit coexist; (ii) pursue in this setting a theory of endogenous sticky prices that can be taken to the data. Search frictions generate price dispersion, and lead to monetary equilibria where profit-maximizing sellers set nominal prices they sometimes keep fixed when aggregate conditions change. Buyers can use cash or cre...

What drives countercyclical volatility? A large literature has documented that many economic variables are more disperse in recessions, but this could either occur because shocks get bigger or because …rms respond more to shocks which are the same size. Existing evidence that the dispersion of endogenous variables rises in recessions cannot tell us which of volatility or responsiveness is getti...

This paper presents a number of responses to Gordon de Brouwer’s criticisms of my paper on monetary policy in Indonesia. Among other things, it argues that de Brouwer has failed to disentangle the impact of two exogenous disturbances on prices—and relative prices—during the crisis and post-crisis period. These disturbances were capital flight, which resulted in real depreciation of the rupiah, ...

When real balances have even a very small productive role, contemporaneous and forwardlooking Taylor-Wicksell rules can induce ubiquitous multiplicities of equilibria and lead to consequences that are unintended by policymakers. This raises the issue of whether it is possible to anchor and stabilize the economy through backward-looking rules. We show that the standard uniqueness results that ar...

We determine optimal discretionary monetary policy in a New-Keynesian model when nominal interest rates are bounded below by zero. Nominal interest rates should be lowered faster in response to adverse shocks than in the case without bound. Such ‘preemptive easing’ is optimal because expectations of a possibly binding bound in the future amplify the e ects of adverse shocks. Calibrating the mod...