My good friend Ben Bernanke is always a hard act to follow. When I drafted these remarks, I was concerned that Ben would take all the best points and cover them extremely well, leaving only some crumbs for Ben McCallum and me to pick up. But his decision to concentrate on one issue central bank...

Among the most notable, but least discussed, hallmarks of what I have called the quiet revolution in central banking practice (Blinder, 2004a) has been the movement toward making monetary policy decisions by committee. Until about a decade ago, most central banks had a single governor, who might...

Two laboratory experiments - one a statistical urn problem, the other a monetary policy experiment - were run to test the commonly-believed hypothesis that groups make decisions more slowly than individuals do. Surprisingly, this turns out not to be true there is no significant difference in...

This paper presents a model of a multi-sector economy in which each sector is characterized by a different type of wage or price stickiness. The various sectors experience the same exogenous shocks and have the same money supply. The analysis shows demand shocks pose no serious problems for...

Standard models of aggregate demand treat money and credit asymmetrically; money is given a special status, while loans, bonds, and other debt instruments are lumped together in a "bond market" and suppressed by Walras' Law. This makes bank liabilities central to the monetary transmission...

The role of inventories in making prices "sticky" is studied by analyzing a dynamic linear-quadratic model of a monopoly firm facing stochastic demand, but able to store its finished goods in inventory. It is shown that, in contrast to the usual presumption, firms that exhibit the smallest...