The productivity gap: Monetary policy, the subprime boom, and the post-2001 productivity surge

It is widely believed that, in the wake of the dot.com crash, the Fed kept the federal funds target rate too low for too long, inadvertently contributing to the subprime boom. We attribute this and other Fed departures from a “neutral” policy stance to the Fed's failure to respond appropriately to exceptional rates of total factor productivity growth. We then show how the Fed, by adhering to a nominal GDP growth rate target, might have succeeded in maintaining such a neutral stance.pre-prin

Introduction: new research in monetary history - A map

This handbook aims to provide a comprehensive (though obviously not exhaustive) picture of state-of-the-art international scholarship on the history of money and currency. The chapters of this handbook cover a wide selection of research topics. They span chronologically from antiquity to nowadays and are geographically stretched from Latin America to Asia, although most of them focus on Western Europe and the USA, as a large part of the existing research does. The authors of these chapters constitute, we hope, a balanced sample of various generations of scholars who contributed to what Barry Eichengreen defined as "the new monetary and financial history" – an approach that combines the analysis of monetary aggregates and policies with the structure and dynamics of the banking sector and financial markets. We have structured this handbook in ten broad thematic parts: the historical origins of money; money, coinage, and the state; trade, money markets, and international currencies; money and metals; monetary experiments; Asian monetary systems; exchange rate regimes; monetary integration; central banking and monetary policy; and aggregate price shocks. In this introduction, we offer for each part some historical context, a few key insights from the literature, and a brief analytical summary of each chapter. Our aim is to draw a map that hopefully will help readers to organize their journey through this very wide and diverse research area