Standard accounts of the Great Depression attribute an important causal role to monetary policy errors in accounting for the catastrophic collapse in economic activity observed in the early 1930s. While views vary on the relative importance of money versus credit contraction in the propagation...

It is argued that bidders in liquidity-providing central bank operations should typically possess declining marginal valuations. Based on this hypothesis, we construct an equilibrium in central bank refinancing operations organised as variable rate tenders. In the case of the discriminatory...

We analyze the properties of the natural rate of interest in an economy where nominal debt contracts generate a spread between loan rates and the policy interest rate. In our model, monetary policy has real effects in the flexible-price equilibrium, because it affects the credit spread. Relying...

How should monetary policy respond to changes in financial conditions? In this paper we consider a simple model where firms are subject to idiosyncratic shocks which may force them to default on their debt. Firms’ assets and liabilities are denominated in nominal terms and predetermined when...

This paper studies optimal monetary policy responses in an economy featuring sectorial heterogeneity in the frequency of price adjustments. It shows that a central bank facing heterogeneous nominal rigidities is more likely to behave less aggressively than in a fully sticky economy. Hence, the...

We study how the use of judgement or add-factorsʺ in macroeconomic forecasting may disturb the set of equilibrium outcomes when agents learn using recursive methods. We isolate conditions under which new phenomena, which we call exuberance equilibria, can exist in standard macroeconomic...