We explore the consequences of safe asset scarcity on aggregate demand in a stylized IS-LM/Mundell Fleming environment. Acute safe asset scarcity forces the economy into a "safety trap" recession. In the open economy, safe asset scarcity spreads from one country to the other via capital flows,...

We provide explicit solutions for government spending multipliers during a liquidity trap and within a fixed exchange regime using standard closed and open-economy models. We confirm the potential for large multipliers during liquidity traps. For a currency union, we show that self-financed...

We use the limited participation model of money as a laboratory for studying the operating characteristics of Taylor rules for setting the rate of interest. Rules are evaluated according to their ability to protect the economy from bad outcomes such as the burst of inflation observed in the...

In the wake of the 1997-98 financial crises, interest rates in Asia were raised immediately, and then reduced sharply. We describe an environment in which this is the optimal monetary policy. The optimality of the immediate rise in the interest rate is an example of the theory of the second...

This paper develops an analytical framework for the analysis of targeting rules for monetary policy. We derive the optimal money supply rule and analyze the implications of other monetary rules including rules that target nominal GNP, the price level, the monetary growth rate and the...

We argue that discretionary monetary policy exposes the economy to welfare-decreasing instability. It does so by creating the potential for private expectations about the response of monetary policy to exogenous shocks to be self-fulfilling. Among the many equilibria that are possible, some have...

Expansionary fiscal policies have increased significantly following the subprime crisis in 2007 and the COVID-19 crisis, leading to fiscal dominance concerns, where a growing share of monetary authorities may be forced to deviate from policy targets to accommodate fiscal policies. Meanwhile,...

This paper examines whether prudential policies help to reduce sovereign bond vulnerability to global spillover risk in ASEAN-4 countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand). We measure sovereign vulnerability within a risk connectedness network among sovereign bonds. The direct...

We propose a supply-side channel for the transmission of monetary policy. We study an economy with heterogeneous firms, sticky prices, and endogenous markups. We show that if, as is consistent with the empirical evidence, bigger firms have higher markups and lower pass-throughs than smaller...