Empirical evidence suggests that movements in international relative prices (such as the real exchange rate) 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...

Arguments favoring Keynesian models over real business cycle models are often made on the grounds that the correlations and impulse response patterns found in the latter are inconsistent with the data. A recent and prominent example of this type of reasoning is Gali (1999). But such conclusions...

This paper examines whether monetary indicators are useful in implementing optimal discretionary monetary policy when the policy maker has incomplete information about the environment. We find that money does not contain useful information for the policy maker, if we calibrate the model to the...

Arguments in favor of Keynesian models as opposed to real business cycle models are often made on the grounds that the correlations and impulse response patterns found in the latter are inconsistent with the data. A recent and prominent example of this reasoning is Gali (1999). But certain...

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...

To be useful as policy indicators, the monetary aggregates M1 and M2 must either (1) provide information on the current state of the economy or (2) help predict future values of economic variables that are of concern to the policymakers. Statistical analysis shows that these aggregates perform...

The interest rate term spread contains useful information for predicting both economic activity and the probability of recessions. Further, the spread contains information not already included in past economic growth and past monetary policy. Nevertheless, the spread's forecasting performance,...

Recently an intense debate has focused on M2's usefulness as an intermediate target for monetary policy. A review of two leading contributions to the debate indicates that their empirical results are sensitive to changes in key assumptions. Moreover, their empirical results lack the deep...