Irving Fisher's encounter with the Quantity theory of Money began in the 1890s, during the debate about bimetallism, and reached its high point in 1911 with the publication of The Purchasing Power of Money. His most important refinement of the theory, derived from his recognition of bank...

The Chicago Fed dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model is used for policy analysis and forecasting at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. This article describes its specification and estimation, its dynamic characteristics and how it is used to forecast the US economy. In many...

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...

The Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) System is a large, complex, and understudied government-sponsored liquidity facility that currently has more than $1 trillion in secured loans outstanding, mostly to commercial banks and thrifts. This paper first documents the significant role played by the FHLB...

We survey the theories of why banks promise to pay par on demand and examine evidence about the conditions under which banks have promised to pay the par value of deposits and banknotes on demand when holding only fractional reserves. The theoretical literature can be broadly divided into four...

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 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...

Correlations of inflation with the growth rate of money increase when data are averaged over longer time periods. Correlations of inflation with the growth of money also are higher when high-inflation as well as low-inflation countries are included in the analysis. We show that serial...

This paper is about the properties of Markov-switching rational expectations (MSRE) models. We discuss possible solution concepts for MSRE models, distinguishing between stationary and bounded equilibria. For the case of models with one variable, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition...