Research Database

In this paper, we use a simple model of money demand to characterize the behavior of monetary aggregates in the United States from 1960 to 2016. We argue that the demand for the currency component of the monetary base has been remarkably stable during this period. We use the model to make projections of the nominal quantity of cash in circulation under alternative future paths for the federal funds rate. Our calculations suggest that if the federal funds rate is lifted up as suggested by the survey of economic projections made by the members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the fall in total currency demanded in the next two years ranges between 50 and 200 billion. Our discussion suggests that specific measures by the Federal Reserve to absorb that cash could be worth considering to make the future path of the price level consistent with the price stability mandate.

The rise in within-group consumption inequality in response to the increase in within-group income inequality over the last three decades in the U.S. is puzzling to expected-utility-based incomplete market models. The two-sided lack of commitment models exhibit too little consumption inequality while the standard incomplete markets models tend to predict too much consumption inequality. We show that a model with two-sided lack of commitment and chance attitudes, as emphasized by prospect theory, can explain the relationship and can avoid the systematic bias of the expected utility models. The chance attitudes, such as optimism and pessimism, imply that the households attribute a higher weight to high and low outcomes compared to their objective probabilities. For realistic values of risk aversion and of chance attitudes, the incentives for households to share the idiosyncratic risk decrease. The latter effect endogenously amplifies the increase in consumption inequality relative to the expected utility model, thereby improving the fit to the data.

The Ramsey approach to policy analysis finds the best competitive equilibrium given a set of available instruments. This approach is silent about unique implementation, namely designing policies so that the associated competitive equilibrium is unique. This silence is particularly problematic in monetary policy environments where many ways of specifying policy lead to indeterminacy. We show that sophisticated policies which depend on the history of private actions and which can differ on and off the equilibrium path can uniquely implement any desired competitive equilibrium. A large literature has argued that monetary policy should adhere to the Taylor principle to eliminate indeterminacy. Our findings say that adherence to the Taylor principle on these grounds is unnecessary. Finally, we show that sophisticated policies are robust to imperfect information.

Prior to the mid-1980s, labor productivity growth was a useful barometer of the U.S. economy’s performance: it was low when the economy was depressed and high when it was booming. Since then, labor productivity has become significantly less procyclical. In the recent downturn of 2008–2009, labor productivity actually rose as GDP plummeted. These facts have motivated the development of new business cycle theories because the conventional view is that they are inconsistent with existing business cycle theory. In this paper, we analyze recent events with existing theory and find that the labor productivity puzzle is much less of a puzzle than previously thought. In light of these findings, we argue that policy agendas arising from new untested theories should be disregarded.

We ask whether a two-country real business cycle model can account simultaneously for domestic and international aspects of business cycles. With this question in mind, we document a number of discrepancies between theory and data. The most striking discrepancy concerns the correlations of consumption and output across countries. In the data, outputs are generally more highly correlated across countries than consumptions. In the model we see the opposite.

A model of a "real" business cycle is produced in which labor market participants possess private information. A class of economies is considered in which interesting cycles cannot arise without private information. A methodology adapted from Kydland and Prescott (1982) is then employed to show that models based on private information can empirically confront salient features of postwar U.S. business cycles. Moreover, this can be done in a way which is consistent with existing microeconomic evidence on wages and labor supply. Finally, it is shown that the important features of the model related to private information are fairly general.

We develop an equilibrium concept in the Debreu (1954) theory of value tradition for a class of adverse selection economies which includes the Spence (1973) signaling and Rothschild-Stiglitz (1976) insurance environments. The equilibrium exists and is optimal. Further, all equilibria have the same individual type utility vector. The economies are large with a finite number of types that maximize expected utility on an underlying commodity space. An implication of the analysis is that the invisible hand works for this class of adverse selection economies.

Two policies toward payments-system risk are common, but superficially appear to be contradictory. One policy is to restrict the exposure to risk generated by one participant to other participants who are, by one measure or another, directly concerned with the risky participant. The other policy is to provide a “safety net,” typically provided by government and funded by taxes collected from all participants and even from non-participants, to share losses due to “systemic risk.” In this paper, we provide a model in which both of these policies can be constituents of an economically efficient regime of payments-risk management.

We consider the nature of optimal cyclical monetary policy in three different stochastic models with various shocks. The first is a pure liquidity effect model, the second is a cost of changing prices model, and the third is an optimal seinorage model. In each case we solve for the optimal monetary policy and describe how money growth and interest rates respond to shocks under the optimal policy. The shocks we consider are money demand shocks, productivity shocks, and government consumption shocks. All of the models have the feature that the Friedman rule of setting the nominal interest rate to zero is not optimal. Optimal policies are always time inconsistent even though lump sum taxation is allowed. At least in some instances we find that optimal policy dictates responses of money growth and interest rates which run counter to conventional wisdom.

In this paper, we generalize the notion of Pareto-efficiency to make it applicable to environments with endogenous populations. Two efficiency concepts are proposed, P-efficiency and A-efficiency. The two concepts differ in how they treat people who are not born. We show how these concepts relate to the notion of Pareto-efficiency when fertility is exogenous. We then prove versions of the first welfare theorem assuming that decision making is efficient within the dynasty. Finally, we give two sets of sufficient conditions for noncooperative equilibria of family decision problems to be efficient. These include the Barro and Becker model as a special case.

A model is presented in which governments can select real expenditure levels which are feasible, hut are sufficiently high that a balanced budget is impossible. Thus governments with large expenditures are committed to inflationary finance schemes. This is the case even though the governments in question have access to lump-sum taxes. In addition, the model can explain why poorer countries tend to make heavier use of the inflation tax than do wealthier countries, and can account for the existence of country-specific fiat monies.

The neoclassical growth model studied in Kydland and Prescott [1982] is modified to permit the capital utilization rate to vary. The effect of this modification is to increase the amplitude of the aggregate fluctuations predicted by theory as the equilibrium response to technological shocks. If following Solow [1957], the changes in output not accounted for by changes in the labor and tangible capital inputs are interpreted as being the technology shocks, the statistical properties of the fluctuations in the post-war United States economy are close in magintude and nature to those predicted by theory.