An analytical innovation enhances microeconomics, enabling it to answer all questions of macroeconomics. It combines the production and consumption decisions of the individual in one model. For each individual, it identifies the customers of what he sells, and the suppliers of what he buys. It...

Market clearing is the central issue in macroeconomics. Two centuries of debate on Say’s Law indicates that the issue is not yet settled. This essay proposes that double coincidence is a necessary condition for market clearing, in addition to the equality of demand and supply at equilibrium...

This paper provides a simple matching model in which unemployed workers and employers in large firms can be matched together through social networks or through more "formal" methods of search. We show that networks do not necessarily add new externalities and that some results previously...

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...

Recently, several central banks have abandoned the usual secrecy in monetary policy and become very transparent. This paper provides an explanation for this puzzling fact, focusing on the disclosure of central bank forecasts. It shows that transparency reduces the inflationary bias and gives the...

This paper examines the long-run effects of supply shocks (such as oil shocks) on inflation in the United States. The persistence of supply shocks in U.S. inflation fell considerably during the period of Volcker’s disinflation (1979-1982). My empirical results suggest that the difference...

This paper presents the Czech approach to inflation targeting (IT) that was co-authored by the authors of the paper. The IT strategy was introduced by the Czech National Bank in 1997. The paper gives an overview of history of monetary policy in the Czech Republic and reasons for a change in...

In this paper, we examine the incentives for central bank activism and caution in a two-country open-economy model with uncertainty and learning. We find that the presence of a strategic interaction between the home and foreign central banks creates an additional motivation for caution in...

This paper introduces staggered wage contracts a la Taylor (1979)into a standard model of monetary policy credibility. The overlapping wage structure is shown to considerably exacerbate the time consistent inflation rate in Markov perfect equilibrium. If the central bank can commit to its...

In this paper we consider inflation and government debt dynamics when monetary policy employs a global interest rate rule and private agents’ forecasts using adaptive learning. Because of the zero lower bound on interest rates, active interest rate rules are known to imply the existence of a...