I thank Jim Crotty for many helpful suggestions, Bob Pollin for very useful discussions on some of the material presented here, Minsik Choi, Dorothy Power and Max Maximov for excellent research assistance and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations for essential financial support. All errors, of course, are mine and mine alone. Please send comments and suggestions to: [email protected] 2 Ab...

The economic history of technologies is largely a history of low-fixed-cost, high-marginal-cost technologies being replaced by newly invented, decreasing-average-cost (approximately, highfixed-cost and low-marginal-cost) technologies that come to be cost minimizing as demand for the product or service produced by the technology increases. The history of payment technology in the past century, a...

We examine the different effects of monetary policy actions and central bank communication on China's stock market bubbles with a Time-varying Parameter SVAR model. We find that with negative responses of fundamental component and positive responses of bubble component of asset prices, contractionary monetary policy induces the observed stock prices to rise during periods of large bubbles. By c...

Central bank communication plays an important role in shaping market participants’ expectations. This paper studies a simple nonlinear model of monetary policy in which agents have incomplete information about the economic environment. It shows that agents’ learning and the dynamics of the economy are heavily affected by central bank transparency about its policy rule. A central bank that does ...

The theory of inferential expectations states that “economic agents hold beliefs that are subject to falsification by new information, in much the same way that they are in conventional statistical hypothesis testing.” We outline the role expectations play in current monetary economic theory by ∗Corresponding author. Contact details: Crawford School of Economics and Government, Australian Natio...

An important question for central banks is how they should report the uncertainty of their forecasts. This paper discusses a way in which a central bank could report the uncertainty of its forecasts in a world in which it used a single macroeconometric model to make its forecasts and guide its policies. Suggestions are then made as to what might be feasible for a central bank to report given th...

In the span of fifteen years, central bank transparency has gone from being highly controversial to motherhood and apple pie (one can insert analogous certitudes by country here). It is now an accepted broad goal to which all central banks pay at least lip service. Yet, like many other broad concepts in economic policy, such as “fiscal discipline” or “price stability,” what central bank transpa...