Since the late 1980s the Fed has implemented monetary policy by adjusting its target for the overnight federal funds rate. Money’s role in monetary policy has been tertiary, at best. Indeed, several influential economists suggest that money is irrelevant for monetary policy: Central banks effect economic activity and inflation by a) controlling a very shortterm nominal interest rate and b) by i...

We study optimal monetary policy when the empirical evidence leaves the policymaker uncertain whether the true data-generating process is given by a model with sticky wages or a model with search and matching frictions in the labor market. Unless the policymaker is almost certain about the search and matching model being the correct data-generating process, the policymaker chooses to stabilize ...

This paper studies the relationship between inflation, output, money and interest rates in the euro area, using data spanning 1980–2000. The P model is shown to have considerable empirical support. Thus, the “price gap” or, equivalently, the “real money gap” (the gap between current real balances and long-run equilibrium real balances), has substantial predictive power for future inflation. The...

This paper studies an advantage of commitment over discretion when a central bank observes only noisy measures of current inflation and output, in the context of an optimizing model with nominal-price stickiness. Under a commitment regime, if current policy turns out to be too expansionary (contractionary) because of the bank’s information problem, subsequent policies should be slightly contrac...

We examine global economic dynamics under infinite-horizon learning in a New Keynesian model in which the interest-rate rule is subject to the zero lower bound. As in Evans, Guse and Honkapohja (2008), we find that under normal monetary and fiscal policy the intended steady state is locally but not globally stable. Unstable deflationary paths can arise after large pessimistic shocks to expectat...

This commentary describes the CPI targeting regime implemented by the Swedish Riksbank during the 1930. This episode is revisited because some people believe that it would be infeasible for a central bank to target a price index successfully. A review of this episode shows that the Riksbank did not face any technical problems in achieving a stable CPI. JEL Codes: E52, E58, N14 Citation: Black, ...

Bank of England, one the leading examples modern banking, has been established at end 17th century. Economic and social turmoils wars that broke up in first half 19th century have led to a serious debate between Currency School Banking regarding primary function BoE. The Charter Act dated 1844 enacted eliminate ongoing instabilities British economy. act was suspended 1847, 1857, 1866 because de...

JEL Classifications: J17, J28, J31 We present the first nationwide value of life estimates for the United States at more than one point in time. Our estimates are for every ten years between 1940 and 1980, a period when declines in fatal accident rates were historically unprecedented. Our estimated elasticity of value of life with respect to per capita GNP is 1.5 to 1.7. We illustrate the impor...

We develop a model of financial intermediation characterized by an inside agency problem such that asset managers, when they have access to high enough liquidity, “reach for yield” by overinvesting in risky assets and concurrently underinvesting in safer or medium-risk assets. The managers follow a pecking order whereby their first preference is to invest in risky assets; their second preferenc...

This paper introduces heterogeneous expectations into a New Keynesian model. Our primary theoretical contribution is to provide an aggregation result for a model with nominal rigidities and heterogeneous bounded rationality. We incorporate bounded rationality at the individual agent level and determine restrictions on expectations operators sufficient to imply aggregate IS and AS relations of t...