Recent monetary policy experience suggests a simple test for models of monetary non-neutrality. Suppose the central bank pegs the nominal interest rate below steady state for a reasonably short period of time. Familiar intuition suggests that this should be inflationary. We pursue this simple...

This paper revisits the size of the fiscal multiplier. The experiment is a fiscal expansion under the assumption of a pegged nominal rate of interest. We demonstrate that a quantitatively important issue is the articulation of the exit from the policy experiment. If the monetary-fiscal expansion...

This paper addresses the positive implications of indexing risky debt to observable aggregate conditions. These issues are pursued within the context of the celebrated financial accelerator model of Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999). The principal conclusions include: (1) the estimated...

Recent monetary policy experience suggests a simple test of models of monetary non-neutrality. Suppose the central bank pegs the nominal interest rate below steady state for a reasonably short period of time. Familiar intuition suggests that this should be inflationary. But a monetary model...

There is growing evidence that the empirical Phillips curve within the US has changed significantly since the early 1980's. In particular, inflation persistence has declined sharply. The paper demonstrates that this decline is consistent with a standard Dynamic New Keynesian (DNK) model in...

Recessions are associated with both rising oil prices and increases in the federal funds rate. Are recessions caused by the spikes in oil prices or by the sharp tightening of monetary policy? This paper discusses the difficulties in disentangling these two effects

Every U.S. recession since 1971 has been preceded by two things: an oil price shock and an increase in the federal funds rate. Bernanke, Gertler, and Watson (1997, 2004) investigated how much oil price shocks have contributed to output growth by asking the following counterfactual question:...

We trace the consequences of an energy shock on the economy under two different monetary policy rules: a standard Taylor rule where the Fed responds to inflation and the output gap; and a Taylor rule with inertia where the Fed moves slowly to the rate predicted by the standard rule. We show that...

We document increased central bank independence within the set of industrialized nations. This increased independence can account for nearly two thirds of the improved inflation performance of these nations over the last two decades