Over the last twenty-five years, a set of influential studies has placed interest rates at the heart of analyses that interpret and evaluate monetary policies. In light of this work, the Federal Reserve's recent policy of "quantitative easing," with its goal of affecting the supply of liquid...

Discussions of monetary policy rules after the 2007-2009 recession highlight the potential ineffectiveness of a central bank's actions when the short-term interest rate under its control is limited by the zero lower bound. This perspective assumes, in a manner consistent with the canonical New...

This article studies the behavior of the economy and the efficacy of monetary policy under zero nominal interest rates using a model with population growth that nests, as a special case, the conventional specification in which there is a single infinitely lived representative agent. The article...

This paper studies the behavior of the economy and the efficacy of monetary policy under zero nominal interest rates, using a model with population growth that nests, as a special case, a more conventional specification in which there is a single infinitely lived representative agent. The paper...

In models with heterogeneous agents, issues of distribution and redistribution jump to the fore, raising the question: Which policies - monetary or fiscal - work most effectively in transferring income between groups? From Townsend's turnpike model, two basic results emerge to help answer this...

This paper develops a general equilibrium model in which households face fixed costs associated with searching for a new supplier of consumption goods. These search costs provide firms with some monopoly power over their existing customers and generate the kind of customer flow dynamics first...

When firms set nominal prices in advance, optimal monetary policy insulates aggregate output against shocks to demand. It can do so, however, by following the constant money growth rule advocated by Milton Friedman; it need not respond to the shocks in an actively countercyclical way. In...

Milton Friedman's permanent income hypothesis implies that data on savings help forecast future income growth. An econometric model that exploits this implication predicts that the U.S. economy will continue to expand in 1995

This paper develops a general equilibrium model in which households face fixed costs associated with searching for a new supplier of consumption goods. These search costs provide firms with some monopoly power over their existing customers and generate the kind of customer flow dynamics first...

Over the last twenty-five years, a set of influential studies has placed interest rates at the heart of analyses that interpret and evaluate monetary policies. In light of this work, the Federal Reserve's recent policy of "quantitative easing," with its goal of affecting the supply of liquid...