In this paper we study how volatility in monetary policy affects economic performance in the presence of endogenously chosen information structures. To isolate the effects produced by the interaction of uncertainty in monetary policy and (possibly) asymmetric information, we consider a model in...

A parsimonious model of shifting policy regimes can simultaneously capture expected and actual US inflation during 1969-2005. Our model features a forward-looking New Keynesian Phillips curve and purposeful policymakers that can or cannot commit. Private sector learning about policymaker type...

This paper develops a model that speaks to the goals and methods of financial-stability policies. There are three main points. First, from a normative perspective, the model defines the fundamental market failure to be addressed, namely that unregulated private money creation can lead to an...

I argue that it is useful to think about the optimal design of monetary institutions using the insights from the theory of incomplete contracts. The core of the monetary policy problem is the uncertainty about future social decisions resulting from the impossibility and the undesirability of...

What set of institutions can support the activity of a central bank? Designing a central bank requires specifying its objective function, including the bank's mandate at different horizons and the choice of banker(s), specifying the resource constraint that limits the resources that the central...

We provide new evidence on how monetary policy affects investment and firm finance in the United States and the United Kingdom. Younger firms paying no dividends exhibit the largest and most significant change in capital expenditure - even after conditioning on size, asset growth, Tobin's Q,...

We develop a rational expectations framework to study the consequences of alternative means to resolve the "unfunded liabilities'' problem---unsustainable exponential growth in federal Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid spending with no plan to finance it. Resolution requires specifying a...

In this paper, we use cross-industry, cross-country panel data to test whether industry growth is positively affected by the interaction between the reactivity of real short term interest rates to the business cycle and industry-level measures of financial constraints. Financial constraints are...

This paper studies the impact of product and labor market reforms when the economy faces major slack and a binding constraint on monetary policy easing---such as the zero lower bound. To this end, we build a two-country model with endogenous producer entry, labor market frictions, and nominal...