Pareto-efficient consumption in a pure-exchange, one good economy varies over states of nature with respect to only two factors: real aggregate supply and individual utility shocks. One’s optimal contract receipts vary with respect to only these two factors and the ratio of one’s endowment...

Unanticipated inflation or deflation causes one party of a nominal contract to gain at the expense of the other party, an effect absent in macroeconomic models with one representative consumer or with consumers having identical consumption. In this paper's general dynamic and stochastic...

Contrary to Sargent and Wallace (1975), a central bank’s use of an interest-rate instrument does determine prices when the central bank pursues either a short-term or long-term price target. However, in order for a central bank’s pursuit of a long-term price target to be credible, the public...

The standard ad hoc monetary objective function creates a bias in favor of inflation targeting. Instead, this paper uses the Pareto criterion to assess inflation targeting (IT), price-level targeting (PLT), and nominal-income targeting (NIT). The effect that unanticipated inflation or deflation...