The nature of price dynamics has long been thought important for the origin and duration of business cycles. To investigate this topic, we construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium macroeconomic model in which monopolistically competitive firms face fixed costs of changing the nominal...

This paper analyzes the effects of inflation variability on economic growth in a model where money is introduced via a cash-in-advance constraint. In this setting, we find that inflation adversely affects long-run growth, even when the cash-in-advance constraint applies only to consumption. At...

This paper studies the effects of fiscal policies -- depicted as stochastic changes in government spending and distortionary tax rates -- when the government cannot use lump sum taxes to achieve intertemporal budget balance. This framework contrasts the more standard analysis in which spending...

Most empirical studies of the rational expectations hypothesis of the term structure find that the data offer little support for the theory. This observation has led some investigators to search for alternative “irrational” theories of behavior in order to explain the data. The authors, on...

The disinflationary episode of the early 1980s was dramatic in the magnitude of the decline in inflation as well as the significant loss of output. Also, the disinflationary policy was announced and carried out over a three-year period. Thus, this episode has the potential to test competing...

This paper analyzes the quantitative significance of Sargent and Wallace's (1981) "Some Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic" in a model that is parameterized to correspond with U.S. data. The major result is that the monetarist arithmetic is not overly unpleasant and that the nominal side of the...

Recently there has been renewed interest in using general equilibrium models to understand the effects of monetary policy on interest rates and real economic activity. This research effort involved the search for models that will account for the liquidity effects -- the decrease in short-term...

In this paper we document real rate behavior. We do this by looking across a wide variety of constructed real rate series. These series are obtained by using a number of different methodologies for estimating expected inflation, using several different price series, and looking over different...

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand operates in a highly deregulated financial environment which lacks any interest rate regulation or reserve requirements. Yet the Reserve Bank has been able to implement effective monetary policy through a quantity-based procedure. This article analyzes the...

The celebrated monetarist arithmetic argument of Sargent and Wallace implies outcomes that may be large and unpleasant. But a dynamic stochastic model calibrated to the U.S. economy reveals the quantitative effect of monetarist arithmetic to be small. Monetary policies that react to the level of...