In this paper I focus on two specific hazard areas in the transition from Stage Two to Stage Three of European economic and monetary union (EMU), as well as on some key problems of Stage Three that EMU's monetary and fiscal structures appear ill-prepared to handle. The transitional hazards are...

Prevalent thinking about liquidity traps suggests that the perfect substitutability of money and bonds at a zero short-term nominal interest rate renders open-market operations ineffective for achieving macroeconomic stabilization goals. In an earlier paper, we showed that this reasoning does...

This paper shows that the optimal extraction of seigniorage implies a strong tendency for inflation to fall over time toward its socially optimal level. The point is made using a multi-period model in which (i) the government can finance deficits through bond issue or money creation, (ii)...

We describe two examples which illustrate in different ways how money and credit may be useful in the conduct of monetary policy. Our first example shows how monitoring money and credit can help anchor private sector expectations about inflation. Our second example shows that a monetary policy...

We consider a model in which monetary policy is governed by a Taylor rule. The model has a unique equilibrium near the steady state, but also has other equilibria. The introduction of a particular escape clause into monetary policy works like the Taylor principle to exclude the other equilibria....

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...

Even when the exchange-rate plays no expenditure-switching role, countries may wish to have flexible exchange rates in order to free the domestic interest rate as a stabilization tool. In a setting with nontraded goods, exchange-rate movements may also enhance international risk sharing

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...

This paper reviews recent research that grapples with the question: What happens after an exogenous shock to monetary policy? We argue that this question is interesting because it lies at the center of a particular approach to assessing the empirical plausibility of structural economic models...