We show that optimal monetary and fiscal policies are time consistent for a class of economies often used in applied work, economies appealing because they are consistent with the growth facts. We establish our results in two steps. We first show that for this class of economies, the Friedman...

Are optimal monetary and fiscal policies time consistent in a monetary economy? Yes, but if and only if under commitment the Friedman rule of setting nominal interest rates to zero is optimal. This result is of applied interest because the Friedman rule is optimal for the standard preferences...

As has been widely observed, the volatility of GDP has declined since the mid-1980s compared with prior years. One leading explanation for this decline is that monetary policy improved significantly in the later period. We utilize a cross-section of 2-digit manufacturing and trade industries to...

This article assesses the importance of the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates for the conduct of monetary policy. The article employs a small, forward-looking model developed by Fuhrer and Moore. The model is simulated under several policy rules that involve either high- or...

A number of recent papers have explored monetary policy options, including inflation targeting and inflation forecast targeting (notably Svensson (1999a, 1999b, 2000)) and price level targeting (Wolman 2000, Batini and Yates 1999, Blinder 1999). Most papers explore "optimal" monetary policy in...

We find conditions for the Friedman rule to be optimal in three standard models of money. These conditions are homotheticity and separability assumptions on preferences similar to those in the public finance literature on optimal uniform commodity taxation. We show that there is no connection...

Refet Gürkaynak, Brian Sack, and Eric Swanson (2005) provide empirical evidence that long forward nominal rates are overly sensitive to monetary policy shocks, and that this is consistent with a model where long-term inflation expectations are not anchored because agents must infer the central...

We consider the channel consisting in transferring the credit risk associated with refinancing operations between financial institutions to market participants. In particular, we analyze liquidity and volatility premia on the French government debt securities market, since these assets are used...

We examine the effects of collateral provision as a potential channel between funding liquidity tensions and the scarcity of market liquidity. This channel consists in transferring the credit risk associated with refinancing operations between financial institutions to market participants that...