Nominal price rigidity has a negative externality: rigidity in one firm's price increases the variability of aggregate real spending, which harms all firms. This paper investigates whether this externality is large, which would imply that stabilization policy can be highly beneficial even if the...

This paper examines whether the Solow growth model is consistent with the international variation in the standard of living. It shows that an augmented Solow model that includes accumulation of human as well as physical capital provides an excellent description of the cross-country data. The...

Because unanticipated monetary expansion leads to real exchange rate depreciation and because the harms of real depreciation are greater in more open economies, the benefits of unanticipated expansion are decreasing in the degree of openness. Models in which the absence of precommitment in...