Modern monetary policy analysis is built around the concept of an interest rate rule that responds to both inflation and output. This paper evaluates the quantitative implications of having a policy rule target different definitions of the output gap in a New Keynesian model with endogenous...

Should one think of zero nominal interest rates as an undesirable liquidity trap or as the desirable Friedman rule? I use three different frameworks to discuss this issue. First, I restate Cole and Kocherlakota's (1998) analysis of Friedman's rule: short run increases in the money stock -...

Most prices and interest rates display fluctuating levels that embody extractable energy and equivalent amounts of money. Such fluctuations are also associated with varying degrees of uncertainty. Shannon's derivations of spectral entropy and information content offer computational techniques...

Unanticipated inflation or deflation causes one party of a nominal contract to gain at the expense of the other party, an effect absent in macroeconomic models with one representative consumer or with consumers having identical consumption. In this paper's general dynamic and stochastic...

Challenging the conventional wisdom that structural problems are to blame for the euro area’s protracted domestic demand stagnation, this paper sets out to shed some fresh light on the role of the ECB in the ongoing EMU crisis. Contrary to the widely held interpretation of the ECB as an...

Monetary policy has an important role in the determination of the inflation rate and the output gap time trajectories. Monetary authorities should choose the nominal interest rate time path that best serves the goals of price stability (primarily) and output growth (as a consequence of the...

We analyze the endogenous appearance of money substitutes, their interaction with outside money, and resulting distortions in the price system of an economy with large monopolies and wide-spread informal networks. The economy consists of productive, individually optimizing agents and less...

Despite evidence that aggregate housing price are predictable, a random walk in time and independence in space are two maintained hypotheses in the empirical models for housing price measurement used by government and commercial companies. This paper examines the price discovery process in...

The paper exploits a unique panel, covering some 2,000 Italian manufacturing firms and 14 years of data on individual prices and individual interest rates paid on several types of debt, to address the question of the existence of a channel of transmission of monetary policy operating through the...

Liquidity traps occur when the natural nominal interest rate becomes negative. In a model with capital price dynamics explicitly considered, we find that shocks in the future can cause current and lasting liquidity traps. We propose that the central bank can prevent or fix liquidity traps by...