The paper presents a measure of monetary impulse that is intended to reflect the medium-term inflationary implications of a nation’s current monetary policy. The measure consists of the growth rate of the monetary base, adjusted for reserve requirement changes and augmented by an implicit...

The model developed in Robert Lucas's influential "Expectations and the Neutrality of Money" has not been widely used for extensions or modifications of the original analysis, in part because of its difficulty of manipulation.The present paper describes a linearized version that--unlike other...

This paper discusses four current topics in monetary policy analysis, each of which hinges on the possibility of multiple solutions in rational expectations (RE) models. In three of these cases--involving inflation forecast targeting, the zero-lower bound deflation trap, and the fiscal theory of...

After some historical discussion of the rational expectations (RE) solution procedures of John Muth, Alan Walters, and Robert Lucas, this paper considers the relevance for actual economies of issues stemming from the existence of multiple RE equilibria. In all linear models, the minimum state...

This expository paper describes major developments during the second decade of rational-expectations macroeconomics, roughly 1982-1991. Topics attracting the most attention from researchers differed from those of 1972-1981, with considerable emphasis being devoted to technical mailers. Here the...

The following arguments are developed: (i) models without monetary aggregates do not imply that inflation is a non-monetary phenomenon and are not necessarily non-monetary models; (ii) theoretical considerations suggest that such models are misspecified, but the quantitative significance of this...

This paper reviews a specific group of recent publications by Black, Fama, Hall, and Greenfield and Yeager that (i) encourage the relaxation of government controls on the banking industry, (ii) emphasize the possibility of an economy in which most transactions are carried out through an...

This paper investigates the performance, in several small-scale models of the Japanese economy, of an operational monetary policy rule related to ones previously considered for the United States. The rule dictates settings of the monetary base that are designed to produce values of nominal GNP...

Svensson (JEL, 2003) argues strongly that specific targeting rules first order optimality conditions for a specific objective function and model are normatively superior to instrument rules for the conduct of monetary policy. That argument is based largely upon four main objections to the latter...

Much recent monetary policy analysis has featured stochastic simulations with small structural macroeconomic models that include: a spending vs. saving ( IS') sector; a price-adjustment sector; and an interest rate policy rule. The first two are frequently specified so as to reflect optimizing...