The world economy has experienced the largest financial crisis in generations, a global pandemic, and a resurgence in inflation during the first quarter of the 21st century, yielding important insights for central banking. Price stability has important benefits and is the responsibility of a...

We develop a general equilibrium model that highlights the trade-offs between physical and digital forms of retail central bank money. The key differences between cash and central bank digital currency (CBDC) include transaction efficiency, possibilities for tax evasion, and, potentially,...

This paper assesses the proximate causes of the post pandemic surge in US inflation, the Federal Reserve's real time reaction to and interpretation of incoming data in 2021, and the pivot to raising rates and shrinking the balance sheet that commenced in 2022 and continues in 2023. Particular...

This paper studies the effectiveness of forward guidance when central banks have imperfect credibility. Exploiting unique survey-based measures of expected inflation, output growth, and interest rates, we estimate a small-scale New Keynesian model for the United States and other G7 countries...

We present a simple long-run aggregate demand and supply framework for evaluating long-run inflation. The framework illustrates how exogenous economic and political economy factors generate central bank pressures that can impact long-run inflation as well as transitions between steady states. We...

In this paper we examine how target ranges work in the context of a Barro-Gordon (1983) type model, in which the time-inconsistency problem stems from political pressures from the government. We show that target ranges turn out to be an excellent way to cope with the time-inconsistency problem,...

We study the optimal Mirrlees taxation problem in a dynamic economy with idiosyncratic (productivity or preference) shocks. In contrast to the standard approach, which implicitly assumes that the mechanism is operated by a benevolent planner with full commitment power, we assume that any...

According to the conventional bank lending channel of monetary policy, wholesale funding in economies with well-developed financial markets moves negatively with retail deposits in response to changes in the monetary policy rate, thereby weakening the transmission of monetary policy. We present...

In this paper I focus on two specific hazard areas in the transition from Stage Two to Stage Three of European economic and monetary union (EMU), as well as on some key problems of Stage Three that EMU's monetary and fiscal structures appear ill-prepared to handle. The transitional hazards are...