This paper asks how a fiscal expansion would affect Japan. It uses a textbook-style macro model calibrated to fit the Japanese economy. According to the results, Japan%u2019s output slump would be ended by a fiscal transfer of 6.6% of GDP. This policy raises the debt-income ratio in the short...

This paper presents a model of monetary policy in which a rise in inflation raises uncertainty about future inflation. When inflation is low, there is a consensus that the monetary authority will try to keep it low. When inflation is high, policymakers face a dilemma: they would like to...

From 2000 to 2003, when Ben Bernanke was a professor and then a Fed Governor, he wrote extensively about monetary policy at the zero bound on interest rates. He advocated aggressive stimulus policies, such as a money-financed tax cut and an inflation target of 3-4%. Yet, since U.S. interest...

This study constructs a new data set on unemployment rates in Latin America and the Caribbean and then explores the determinants of unemployment. We compare different countries, finding that unemployment is influenced by the size of the rural population and that the effects of government...

This paper seeks to understand the behavior of Greenspan's Federal Reserve in the late 1990s. Some authors suggest that the Fed followed a simple 'Taylor rule,' while others argue that it deviated from such a rule because it recognized that the 'New Economy' permitted an easing of policy. We...

The paper estimates a long-run demand function for M1, using U.S. data for 1959-1993. This paper interprets deviations from this long-run relation with Goldfeld's partial adjustment model. A key innovation is the choice of the interest rate in the money demand function. Most previous work uses a...

This paper studies the welfare properties of the equilibrium timing of price changes. Staggered price-setting has the advantage that it permits rapid adjustment to firm-specific shocks but the disadvantage that it causes price level inertia and therefore increases aggregate fluctuations. Because...

Many observers suggest that the "globalization" of the U.S. economy has changed the behavior of inflation. This essay examines this idea, focusing on several questions: (1) Has globalization reduced the long-run level of inflation? (2) Has it affected the structure of inflation dynamics, as...

This paper assumes that workers can move from a market with high unemployment to one with low unemployment at a cost. In principle. equilibrium mobility can be greater or less than the social optimum. For most plausible parameter values. however. mobility is too low. Intuitively. mobility has a...

This paper studies the welfare effects of the relative price variability arising from inflation. When agents interact in anonymous markets, with customers buying from new suppliers each period, relative price variability benefits customers and cannot harm suppliers substantially. But if...