This paper shows that there exist fiscal strategies that deliver equilibrium uniqueness in a monetary economy in which the central bank follows an interest rate peg. In contrast to the fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL), such strategies always satisfy a government intertemporal budget...

In this paper I analyze the classes of price-paths arising from a non-Ricardian fiscal monetary plan along the lines of the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level (FTPL), under a price invariant nominal money supply rule in a standard Sidrauski-Brock model. I first show that fiscalist speculative...

I examine the postulates of the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level (FTPL) under a nominal interest rate peg. First, I show that the usual definition of a non-Ricardian plan involves a number of government's non-credible policy commitments, thus confuting the interpretation of the FTPL as a...

This document contains the text of the 1998 Central Banking Lecture delivered at the London School of Economics and Political Science on June 4th. It starts by asking what factors have been behind the remarkable retreat of inflation that has taken place internationally since the mid-eighties,...

This paper analyzes the effects of monetary shocks in a DSGE model that allows for a general form of smoothly state-dependent pricing by firms. As in Dotsey, King, and Wolman (1999) and Caballero and Engel (2007), our setup is based on one fundamental property: firms are more likely to adjust...

During the 1970s and early 1980s, Spain suffered high rates of inflation but inflation declined and by 1997 inflation had fallen to approximately 2 percent. To fight inflation, Spain implemented austere monetary programs, joined the EMS in 1989, enacted central bank autonomy in 1994, and...

An exogenous oil price shock raises inflation and contracts output, similar to a negative productivity shock. In the standard New Keynesian model, however, this does not generate a tradeoff between inflation and output gap volatility: under a strict inflation targeting policy, the output decline...

This paper presents a model featuring variable utilization rates across firms due to production inflexibilities and idiosyncratic demand uncertainty. Within a New Keynesian framework, we show how the corresponding bottlenecks and stock-outs generate asymmetries in the transmission mechanism of...

The purpose of the present paper is twofold. First, we characterize de Fed's systematic response to technology shocks and its implications for US output, hours and inflation. Second we evaluate the extent to which that responses can be accounted for by a simple monetary policy rule in the...

Recent treatments of the issue of a zero floor on nominal interest rates have been subject to some important methodological limitations. These include the assumption of perfect foresight or the introduction of the zero lower bound as an initial condition or a constraint on the variance of the...