Identification and the liquidity effect: a case study

This article reviews some of the issues economists confront in attempting to compile facts about how monetary policy actions affect the economy.Monetary policy - United States ; Liquidity (Economics) ; Monetary policy

Resolving the liquidity effect: commentary

Liquidity (Economics)

Understanding Japan's saving rate: the reconstruction hypothesis

This paper evaluates Hayashi's conjecture that Japan's postwar saving experience can be accounted for by the neoclassical model of economic growth as that country's efforts to reconstruct its capital stock that was severely damaged in World War II. I call this the reconstruction hypothesis. I take a simplified version of a standard neoclassical growth model that is in widespread use in macroeconomics and simulate its response to capital destruction. The saving rate path implied by the model differs significantly from the path taken by actual Japanese postwar saving data. I discuss several model modifications which would reconcile the reconstruction hypothesis with Japan's postwar saving experience. For the reconstruction hypothesis to be credible requires independent evidence on the empirical plausibility of the model modifications. It is left to future research to determine whether that evidence exists.Saving and investment ; Japan

Searching For a Break in GNP

It has been suggested that existing estimates of the long-run impact of a surprise move in income may have a substantial upward bias due to the presence of a trend break in post war U.S. GNP data. This paper shows that the statistical evidence does not warrant abandoning the no trend null hypothesis. A key part of the argument is that conventionally computed significance levels overstate the likelihood of the trend break alternative hypothesis. This is because they do not take into account that, in practice, the break date is chosen based on pre-test examination of the data.

Money and the U.S. economy in the 1980s: a break from the past?

Money supply ; Velocity of money

The Band pass filter

The "ideal" band-pass filter can be used to isolate the component of a time series that lies within a particular band of frequencies, but applying this filter requires a data set of infinite length. In practice, some sort of approximation is needed. Using projections, the authors derive approximations that are optimal when the time-series representations underlying the raw data have a unit root, or are stationary about a trend.Time-series analysis

Understanding the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level

We review the fiscal theory of the price level. We place special emphasis on the theory's implications for the feasibility of price stability.

Money Growth Monitoring and the Taylor Rule

Using a series of examples, we review the various ways in which a monetary policy characterized by the Taylor rule can inject volatility into the economy. In the examples, a particular modification to the Taylor rule can reduce or even entirely eliminate the problems. Under the modified policy, the central bank monitors the money growth rate and commits to abandoning the Taylor rule in favor of a money growth rule in case money growth passes outside a particular monitoring range.

Inflation and monetary policy in the twentieth century

This article characterizes the change in the nature of the money growth-inflation and unemployment-inflation relationships between the first and second halves of the twentieth century. The changes are substantial, and the authors discuss some of the implications for modeling inflation dynamics, notably for models of inflation that say that bad inflation outcomes result from poorly designed monetary policy institutions.Inflation (Finance) ; Monetary policy ; Unemployment