The characteristics that distinguish most developing countries, compared to large industrialized countries, include: greater exposure to supply shocks in general and trade volatility in particular, procyclicality of both domestic fiscal policy and international finance, lower credibility with...

The mechanism-design approach to monetary theory is the search for fruitful settings in which money is necessary for the achievement of some desirable allocations. Fruitfulness means that the settings provide insights about puzzling observations and policy questions. Settings with three...

This chapter updates the Bordo and Schwartz chapter in Volume 1A of the Handbook of Macroeconomics to 2008.

Much recent research has focused on the development and analysis of extensions of the New Keynesian framework that model labor market frictions and unemployment explicitly. This chapter describes some of the essential ingredients and properties of those models, and their implications for...

We discuss the evolution in macroeconomic thought on the monetary policy transmission mechanism and present related empirical evidence. The core channels of policy transmission -- the neoclassical links between short-term policy interest rates, other asset prices such as long-term interest...

We reconsider the role of financial intermediaries in monetary economics, and explore the hypothesis that the financial intermediary sector is the engine that drives the financial cycle through fluctuations in the price of risk. In this framework, balance sheet quantities emerge as a key...

This chapter examines the concept of inflation persistence in macroeconomic theory. It begins by defining persistence -- emphasizing the difference between reduced-form and structural persistence. It then examines a number of empirical measures of reduced-form persistence, considering the...

We develop a canonical framework to think about credit market frictions and aggregate economic activity in the context of the current crisis. We use the framework to address two issues in particular: first, how disruptions in financial intermediation can induce a crisis that affects real...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of the models used in New Monetarist Economics, which is our label for a body of recent work on money, banking, payments systems, asset markets, and related topics. A key principle in New Monetarism is that solid microfoundations are critical for...

This paper focuses on simple normative rules for monetary policy that central banks can use to guide their interest rate decisions. Such rules were first derived from research on empirical monetary models with rational expectations and sticky prices built in the 1970s and 1980s. During the past...