There exists a large literature on the optimal deterrence of crime. Within the literature, however, there exists a controversy over what the appropriate criterion to determine optimality should be. While the most popular method is that of maximization of a utilitarian welfare function, another...

Concern about globalization has rekindled interest in a longstanding issue--the implications for macroeconomic stability of alternative monetary/exchange-rate policies. This paper re-examines the issue, and it assesses the robustness of several recommendations by comparing the results of a...

In an era where the primary policy instrument is the level of short-term interest rates, comparing the level of such a rate relative to some equilibrium value can be a useful guide for policy and a convenient method to measure the stance of monetary policy. The real interest rate gap, the...

Using a closed-economy model, Jensen (2002) and Walsh (2003), have, respectively shown that a policy regime that optimally targets nominal income growth (NIT) or the change in the output gap (SLT) outperforms a regime that targets inflation, because NIT and SLT induce more inertia in the actions...

One of the central lessons learned from the Great Depression was that adjusting government spending each year to balance the budget increases the volatility of output. We compare this policy with one that involves running temporary deficits and surpluses and an average budget balance of zero....

We compare inflation targeting and price-level targeting in the canonical New Keynesian model, with particular attention to multiple steady-states, indeterminacy, and global stability. Under price-level targeting we show the following: 1) the well-known problem of multiple steady-state...

In this paper, we evaluate seven simple monetary policy rules in a wide range of models of the Canadian economy. Our results indicate that none of the seven simple policy rules we examined is robust to model uncertainty, in that no single rule performs well in all models. In fact, our results...