We estimate the effect of shifts in monetary policy using the term structure of interest rates. In our no-arbitrage model, the short rate follows a version of the Taylor (1993) rule where the coefficients on inflation and output can vary over time. We find that monetary policy loadings on inflation, but not output, changed substantially over the last 50 years. Agents tend to assign a risk disco...

Many empirical studies find robust evidence that marginal cost of production directly depends on the nominal rate of interest. This relationship induces a cost channel for monetary policy transmission. Although the empirical literature provides ample evidence for a cost channel, studies that evaluate the welfare gains from monetary policy commitment have so far entirely ignored its presence. Th...

economic development plans normally contain some policy objectives, especially for the most important macroeconomic variables. governments are expected to take best policies to achieve these objectives, although due to some structural or other impediments they may fail to touch the objectives. we have attempted to uncover the determinants of private consumption and investment as the objectives ...

The objective of this paper is to reexamine the monetary mechanism, that is the mechanism through which the monetary authority by controlling certain financial variables achieves (more or less) effective control over nominal income. We propose to argue that the view of the monetary mechanism which has been widely accepted, at least until very recently, by both monetarists and Keynesians and whi...

Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta E C O N O M I C R E V I E W Third Quarter 2003 I t is a great pleasure to attend this conference on monetary policy and learning and enjoy the many excellent papers presented here. I am very grateful for the opportunity to speak to this distinguished audience of researchers and policymakers, and I hope my remarks will stimulate some further discussion. I will tal...

What is the optimal institutional structure for an independent central bank? The paper shows when it will be optimal for a country to have a central bank to be organized according to federal, purely national or a combination of both aspects. The analysis is then extended to a supranational monetary union and it is shown which organizational structure of a common central bank is optimal for part...

The purpose of the present paper is to examine the implications of the Federal Reserve-MIT-Penn Model (hereafter referred to as the FMP model) with respect to the central question with which this conference is concerned, namely whether and, if so, to what extent, monetary policy affects economic activity through its direct impact on cosumers’ expenditure. For the purpose of this paper we have c...

We re-examine optimal monetary policy when lump-sum taxes are unavailable. Under commitment, we show that, with alternative utility functions to that considered in Nicolini’s related analysis, the direction of the incentive to cheat may depend on the initial level of government debt, with low debt creating an incentive towards surprise deflation, but high debt the reverse. Under discretion, we ...

In the Keynesian model we thought of monetary policy as exogenous in the sense that the money supply, Mt, was set exogenously. This is useful for understanding the model but doesn’t really describe how monetary policy works in practice. In the real world, central banks adjust the money supply (and hence interest rates) endogenously in response to changing conditions. In this set of notes we dis...