In this essay, I analyze Salvador Allende's economic policies in Chile during the early 1970s. I argue that the explosion of inflation during his administration (above 1,500% on a six-month annualized measure) was predictable, and that the government's response to it, through massive and strict...

The 'International Policy Trilemma' refers to the constraint on independent monetary policy that is forced on a country which remains open to international financial markets and simultaneously pursues an exchange rate target. This paper shows that, in a global economy with open financial...

With integrated trade and financial markets, a collapse in aggregate demand in a large country can cause 'natural real interest rates' to fall below zero in all countries, giving rise to a global 'liquidity trap'. This paper explores the policy choices that maximize the joint welfare of all...

Open economy macro theory says that when a country is subject to idiosyncratic macro shocks, it should have its own currency and a flexible exchange rate. But recently in many countries policy rates have been pushed down close to the lower bound, limiting the ability of policy-makers to...

In this paper I analyze the work on exchange rates and external imbalances by University of Chicago faculty members during the university's first hundred years, 1892-1992. Many people associate Chicago's views with Milton Friedman's advocacy for flexible exchange rates. But, of course, there was...

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...

Monetary rules may have a large effect on the outcome of trade wars if central banks target the CPI inflation rate or more generally changes in the relative price of traded goods. We lay out a two-country open-economy model with sticky prices where countries engage in trade wars. In the presence...

This paper surveys the research in the past decade on imperfect information models of aggregate supply and the Phillips curve. This new work has emphasized that information is dispersed and disseminates slowly across a population of agents who strategically interact in their use of information....

This paper explores a model of wage adjustment based on the assumption that information disseminates slowly throughout the population of wage setters. This informational frictional yields interesting and plausible dynamics for employment and inflation in response to exogenous movements in...

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,...