This paper re-examines the out-of-sample predictive power of interest rate spreads when the short-term nominal rates have been stuck at the zero lower bound and the Fed has used unconventional monetary policy. Our results suggest that the predictive power of some interest rate spreads have...

Keynes’ original intention in introducing the concept of a liquidity trap was to explain the reason why persistent large amounts of unutilized resources were generated during the Great Depression. This paper shows that this type of phenomenon cannot be explained in the framework of a...

We show that business cycles can emerge and proliferate endogenously in the economy due to the way economic agents learn, form their expectations, and make decisions regarding savings and production for future periods. There are no exogenous shocks of any kind to productivity or any other...

This paper examines the time varying impact of technology news shocks on the U.S. economy during the Post-World War II era using a structural time varying parameter vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model. The identification restrictions are derived froma standard new Keynesian dynamic stochastic...

As well as providing an analysis of how financial stability could be sustained through the appropriate targeting of policy instruments at debt gearing, this paper aims to provide an overview of the respective roles which governments and shareholders could assume in deterring financial...

Models dealing with monetary policy are generally based on microfoundations that characterize the behaviour of representative agents (households and firms). To explain the representative consumer behaviour, it is generally assumed a utility function in which the intertemporal elasticity of...

The current financial crisis followed the “great moderation,” according to which the world’s central banks had gotten so good at countercyclical policy that the business cycle no longer existed. As more and more economists and media people became convinced that the risk of recessions had...

The standard new Keynesian monetary policy problem is, in its original presentation, a linear model. As a result, only three possibilities are admissible in terms of long term dynamics: the equilibrium may be a stable node, an unstable node or a saddle point. Fixed point stability (a stable...

In late 2008 and early 2009, there has been a serious deterioration in the economic outlook of political leaders, the media and many economic analysts. Comparisons of recent performance and the outlook have degenerated into comparisons with the Great Depression of the 1930s, suggesting that the...

Milton Friedman, one of greatest economists of all time, died on November 16, 2006 at age 94. He was famous for his conclusion that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,” and for the related notion that ultimately the only thing a central bank, such as the Federal...