Aggregation in the presence of data processing lags distorts the information content of data, violating orthogonality restrictions that hold at the individual level. Though the phenomenon is general, it is illustrated here for the life cycle-permanent model. Cross-section and pooled-panel data...

Long-term economic development involves four fundamental processes: the exploitation of increasing returns to specialization, the transition from household to market production, knowledge and human capital accumulation, and industrialization. In this paper, we integrate these processes into a...

The paper describes key aspects of actual Federal Reserve interest rate targeting procedures and addresses a number of issues in light of these stylized facts. It reviews the connection between rate smoothing and price level trend-stationarity. It critiques interest rate targeting as inflation...

For industrial countries in the post-war period, the price level and the money stock have displayed little tendency to revert to given growth paths. Indeed, this stylized fact is frequently referred to by monetarist critics of central banks, who point out that periods of temporarily high or low...

This article discusses a technical aspect of the Federal Reserve's monetary targeting procedure that has come to be known as "base drift." The Fed has been announcing larger ranges for the growth of M1 and other monetary aggregates since 1975. These ranges have been expressed in terms of rates...

The paper contains a theoretical discussion of the role of secrecy in the implementation of monetary policy. It documents the Federal Reserve's defense of secrecy as argued in a recent Freedom of Information Act suit. The Federal Reserve's arguments are evaluated on the basis of economic theory....

This paper is intended as a positive analysis of temporary government policy actions under a gold standard. To understand a gold standard is to understand the private valuation of money and gold as assets, and how their asset values can be influenced by government money and gold policy actions...

Financial deregulation is widely understood to have important economic benefits for microeconomic reasons. Since Adam Smith, economists have provided arguments and evidence that unfettered private markets yield outcomes that are superior to public sector alternatives. But financial regulations -...

In any discussion of the demand for money it is important to be clear about the concept of money that is being utilized; otherwise, misunderstandings can arise because of the various possible meanings that readers could have in mind. Here the term will be taken to refer to an economy's medium of...