Monetary economists have recently begun a serious study of money supply rules that allow the Fed to adjustably peg the nominal interest rate under rational expectations. These rules vary from procedures that produce stationary nominal magnitudes to those that generate nonstationarities in...

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 and...

The Economic Recovery Act of 1981 led to the largest postwar decline in effective tax rates on capital. The legislation also had its most significant effect on rates in 1982 due to the rapid decline in inflation. Although some of the tax cut was rescinded in 1982, effective corporate tax rates...

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 studies the effects of fiscal policies--depicted as stochastic changes in government spending and distortionary tax rates--when the government is constrained from using lump sum taxes for achieving intertemporal budget balance. The ratio of debt to gnp, therefore, has consequences for...

The idea of totally deregulating the financial system and implementing monetary policy through currency control has received renewed attention. An important aspect concerning the desirability of using currency as the instrument of policy is the behavior of the demand for currency. If currency...

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 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...

Real business cycle models have recently been applied to settings in which equilibria are suboptimal. In most models the solutions are approximated using some type of linearization with little attention being given to the accuracy of the approximation. In this paper we investigate three...

The behavior of the Federal Reserve System can be characterized as secretive with respect to its control of monetary aggregates. One common justification for this secrecy is that markets will overreact to information, causing undue variability in interest rates. However, the consequences of...