Research Database

This paper presents a monetarist model of the business cycle with price-setting firms. The model is estimated, and the point estimates used in simulations to illustrate the properties of the model. The real goods market is found to be stable, although subject to sharp changes in output. This model is consistent with rational expectations. Nevertheless, monetary policy can have a lasting impact, and the simulations show this to be the case. Fiscal policy too is found to influence the business cycle, but its short-run effects are substantially smaller than its impact effects. The possibility of an activist government policy in this model does not imply the efficiency of an activist policy.

This paper puts forward a method of policy simulation with an existing macroeconometric model under the maintained assumption that individuals form their expectations rationally. This new simulation technique grows out of Lucas' criticism that standard econometric policy evaluation permits policy rules to change but doesn't allow expectations mechanisms to respond as economic theory predicts they will. This technique is applied to versions of the St. Louis Federal Reserve model and the FRB-MIT-Penn model to simulate the effects of different constant money growth policies. I shall briefly summarize the current practice of policy evaluation and the Lucas critique in the first section. The second section includes an explanation of the method I propose. The third section includes the two illustrative applications. In the conclusion, I cannot resist the temptation to offer some opinions about the use and usefulness of econometric models.

This thesis consists of a series of essays on the theory of exchange under uncertainty. The first essay examines the welfare implications of futures markets in the context of complete markets for contingent claims. It is shown that in a C-good, S-state world the equilibrium allocations resulting from the operation of pre-state noncontingent futures markets and post-state spot markets may be Pareto optimal. This proposition turns on the fact that a futures contract can be interpreted as a security whose state-specific return is the post-state spot price. If the matrix of spot prices has rank S, then, with futures and spot markets, agents can achieve the same allocations over states as with complete markets for contingent claims.

Includes title: "Minnesota Economic Environment: 1985" by David Dahl, John Rosine and Thomas Supel