Measured aggregate U.S. consumption does not behave like a martingale. The authors develop and test two variants of the permanent income model which reflect that. In both, agents make decisions in continuous time. In one variant, martingale behavior holds; serial persistence in measured...

This paper assesses the impact of a monetary policy shock on the U.S. economy. The authors' measures of contractionary monetary policy shocks are associated with a fall in various monetary aggregates and a rise in the federal funds rate, declines in different measures of real activity, and sharp...

This paper presents a flexible-price, quantitative general equilibrium model with the property that a positive money supply shock drives the nominal interest rate down, and aggregate employment, output, and the real wage up. These implications are broadly consistent with postwar U.S. data. The...

This paper develops the quantitative implications of optimal fiscal policy in a business cycle model. In a stationary equilibrium, the ex ante tax rate on capital income is approximately zero. The tax rate on labor income fluctuates very little and inherits the persistence properties of the...

This article studies the accuracy of two versions of Kydland and Prescott's (1980, 1982) procedure for approximating optimal decision rules in problems in which the objective fails to be quadratic and the constraints fail to be linear. The analysis is carried out using a version of the...

This paper studies P. Cagan's model of the German hyperinflation under the hypothesis that adaptive expectations are rational. It shows that inference about the key money demand elasticity parameter, a, is very senstitive to the specification of the dynamic interaction of the unobserved money...

I present an undetermined coefficients method for obtaining a linear approximating to the solution of a class of dynamic, rational expectations models. I also show how that solution can be used to compute a model's implications for impulse response functions and for second moments. Copyright...