Do exogenous money growth rules produce price level determinacy? This is a classic topic in monetary theory. This paper contributes to this literature by examining the effect of money demand timing. The paper demonstrates how conditions for determinacy vary depneding upon whether the theoretical...

This paper demonstrates that in a standard flexible-price monetary model there exists real indeterminacy whenever the nominal interest rate moves too closely with either current or forecasted inflation. However, an aggressive response to lagged inflation will ensure determinacy. These...

What inflation rate should the central bank target? We address determinacy issues related to this question in a two-sector model in which prices can differ in equilibrium. We assume that the degree of nominal price stickiness can vary across the sectors and that labor is immobile. The...

The idea that the monetary authority cannot achieve price stability except at the cost of a recession is the most common and convincing argument against price stability. This paper presents calculations showing that the resource costs of a recession that might result from eliminating a 4 percent...

A comparison of a simple two-bracket income tax code with an approximation to traditional structures that entail steeply rising marginal tax rates, showing that the simpler rate structures are not necessarily more efficient than alternatives with many, highly progressive brackets.

An argument that raising federal revenues through suspending indexation of the personal income-tax code is inefficient in that it is inferior to direct increases in marginal tax rates.

The Modigliani-Miller theorem is fundamental to the theory of corporate finance. One of the theorem's immediate implications is that there is no reason for the monetary authority to respond to asset prices. This article posits a world in which the Modigliani-Miller theorem does not hold. The...

An analysis of the quantitative effects of agency costs in a real business cycle model, showing that these costs can explain why output growth displays positive autocorrelation at short horizons.

It is well known that sunspot equilibria may arise under an interest-rate operating procedure in which the central bank varies the nominal rate with movements in future inflation (a forward-looking Taylor rule). This paper demonstrates that these sunspot equilibria may be learnable in the sense...