We study discretionary equilibrium in the Calvo pricing model for a monetary authority that chooses the money supply. The steady-state inflation rate is above 8 percent for a baseline calibration, but it varies substantially with alternative structural parameter values. If the initial condition...

Optimal monetary policy maximizes welfare, given frictions in the economic environment. Constructing a model with two sets of frictions - the Keynesian friction of costly price adjustment by imperfectly competitive firms and the Monetarist friction of costly exchange of wealth for goods - we...

Reasoning within the New Neoclassical Synthesis (NNS) we previously recommended that price stability should be the primary objective of monetary policy. We called this a neutral policy because it keeps output at its potential, defined as the outcome of an imperfectly competitive real business...

In a canonical staggered pricing model, monetary discretion leads to multiple private sector equilibria. The basis for multiplicity is a form of policy complementarity. Specifically, prices set in the current period embed expectations about future policy, and actual future policy responds to...

Arguments in favor of Keynesian models as opposed to real business cycle models are often made on the grounds that the correlations and impulse response patterns found in the latter are inconsistent with the data. A recent and prominent example of this reasoning is Gali (1999). But certain...

The analysis in Ball and Romer [1991] suggests that models with fixed costs of changing price may be rife with multiple equilibria; in their static model price adjustment is always characterized by strategic complementarity, a necessary condition for multiplicity. We extend Ball and Romer's...