We study the implications of alternative monetary targeting procedures for real interest rates and economic activity. We find that countercyclical monetary policy rules lead to higher real interest rates, higher average tax rates, lower output but lower variability of tax rates and consumption...

The workhorse DSGE model used for monetary policy evaluation is designed to capture business cycle fluctuations in an optimization-based format. It is commonplace to log-linearize models and express them with variables in deviation-from-steady-state format. Structural parameters are either...

For a time, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) seemed to have learned from the mistakes of the past. Instead of taking good economic performance as a sign of incipient inflation, Chairman Alan Greenspan kept interest rates relatively low in the late 1990s, even as unemployment plummeted....

The most charitable interpretation of the Federal Reserve's recent interest rate hikes is that they appear to have been premature. A convincing array of data on payrolls, employment-to-population ratios, and other labor market indicators show that the current recovery has not yet attained the...

This paper shows that monetary policy should be delegated to a central bank that cross-checks optimal policy with information from the Taylor rule. Attaching some weight to deviations of the interest rate from the interest rate prescribed by the Taylor rule is beneficial if the central bank aims...

The paper addresses the classical question how to lead the economy from a recession back to full employment in an open economy. In a recession caused by an adverse demand shock, optimal policies crucially depend on whether the income multiplier related to a policy is bigger than unity. This...

Senior Scholar James K. Galbraith argues the fundamental illusion of viewing the US economy through the free-market prism of deregulation, privatization, and a benevolent government operating mainly through monetary stabilization - the prevailing view among economists over the past three...

The Bank of Canada Global Economy Model (BoC-GEM) is used to examine the effect of various types of discretionary fiscal policies on different regions of the globe. The BoC-GEM is a microfounded dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium global model with six regions, multiple sectors, and...