Until recently, when assessing the economic effects of monetary policy, economists have emphasized the role of unanticipated changes in policy. But are these policy shocks likely to be the most important influence on the economy? Mike Dotsey believes not. It seems more likely that the Fed's...

Whether policymakers should commit to a certain course of action or have the flexibility to approach each situation as it arises continues to be a central question in the design of monetary policy. A seminal article written by two prominent economists in 1977 analyzed the benefits of carrying...

This paper analyzes the effects of stochastic taxes on production in simple stochastic growth model. In so doing, the paper explicitly examines the importance of uncertainty on the decisions of individual agents. This importance is emphasized by comparing economic outcome to various realizations...

Empirical evidence suggests that movements in international relative prices are large and persistent. Nontraded goods, both in the form of final consumption goods and as an input into the production of final tradable goods, are an important aspect behind international relative price movements....

This paper explores the implications of rational expectations and the aggregate supply theory advanced by Lucas (1973) for analysis of optimal monetary policy under uncertainty along the lines of Poole (1970), returning to a topic initially treated by Sargent and Wallace (1975). Not...

This paper provides a detailed examination of various money stock control procedures in a rational expectations environment. A major result is that borrowed reserve targeting is not necessarily equivalent to a noisy funds rate instrument. However, total reserve control, under contemporaneous...

We show that standard alternative assumptions about the currency in which firms price export goods are virtually inconsequential for the properties of aggregate variables, other than the terms of trade, in a quantitative open-economy model. This result is in contrast to a large literature that...

Various reasons have been given to explain downturns in U.S. economic activity since World War II. Romer and Romer (1989) argued that these recessions were primarily associated with monetary contractions, while Hamilton (1983) and others attributed them to oil price increases. We investigate...