This paper surveys the literature of the Bullionist controversy which dominated the development of Classical monetary economics between 1797 and the early 1820s. It highlights the contributions of Henry Thornton to the early phase of the debate, particularly his refutation of the Real Bill...

Today' standard model of monetary policy has aggregate demand responding directly to an interest rate under the central bank's control, and ignores the role played by the quantity of money in the transmission mechanism. Even though monetary policy is usually aimed at controlling price level...

This paper traces the evolution of debate about the question of Rules versus Discretion in monetary policy from about 1800 until the mid 1930s. Particular attention is paid to long-versus-short-run issues, notably with respect to the 1844 Bank Charter Act, and the Bagehot Principle, as well as...

Recent research has found that the dynamic properties of the New Keynesian model can be very different when the nominal interest rate is zero. Improvements in technology and reductions in the labor tax rate lower economic activity, and the size of the government purchase output multiplier can be...

We examine the sources of macroeconomic economic fluctuations by estimating a variety of medium-scale DSGE models within a unified framework that incorporates regime switching both in shock variances and in the inflation target. Our general framework includes a number of different model features...

This paper studies a New Keynesian model in which monetary policy may switch between regimes. We derive sufficient conditions for indeterminacy that are easy to implement and we show that the necessary and sufficient condition for determinacy, provided by Davig and Leeper, is necessary but not...

We develop a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for equilibria to be determinate in a class of forward-looking Markov-switching rational expectations models, and we develop an algorithm to check these conditions in practice. We use three examples, based on the new Keynesian model of...

This paper computes welfare-maximizing monetary and fiscal policy rules in a real business cycle model augmented with sticky prices, a demand for money, taxation, and stochastic government consumption. We consider simple feedback rules whereby the nominal interest rate is set as a function of...

This paper contributes to the policy evaluation literature by developing new strategies to study alternative policy rules. We compare optimal rules to simple rules within canonical monetary policy models. In our context, an optimal rule represents the solution to an intertemporal optimization...

The possibility of regime shifts in monetary policy can have important effects on rational agents' expectation formation and equilibrium dynamics. In a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model where the monetary policy rule switches between a dovish regime that accommodates inflation and a...