Problems for a fundamental theory of house prices

We describe a simple model of the demand for housing and show that on a balanced growth path the rate at which the relative price of housing changes over time is determined by the relative productivity growth rates of the housing sector and the rest of the economy. A calibrated version of the model has only limited success in accounting for the increased rate of house price appreciation since the mid-1990s. We then extend the model to include a collateral constrained consumer. We show that the impact of collateral constraints is limited. Collateral constraints may affect the level of the housing price path, but they do not affect the growth rate of housing prices.Housing - Prices

Inventory investment and the business cycle

Inventories ; Business cycles

Towards a theory of capacity utilization: shiftwork and the workweek of capital

Labor productivity

Growth accounting with technological revolutions

Technology ; Productivity

Evolving inflation dynamics and the New Keynesian Phillips curve

Inflation (Finance)

Monetary policy with interest on reserves

Since the fall of 2008, the amount of outstanding reserves on the Federal Reserve's balance sheet has increased from about 100 billion dollars to more than 1 trillion dollars. There is some concern that the magnitude of outstanding reserves might affect the ability of the Federal Reserve to conduct monetary policy through an interest rate policy. In this article I argue that the ability of the Federal Reserve to pay interest on reserves, also introduced in the fall of 2008, should lessen this concern. For an appropriately modified baseline model of money, I show that, with the payment of interest on reserves, the interaction of monetary and fiscal policy in the determination of the price level is not affected in a quantitatively meaningful way by the amount of outstanding reserves.Inflation (Finance) ; Monetary policy

The IT revolution : is it evident in the productivity numbers?

Information technology ; Productivity

On the implementation of Markov-perfect monetary policy

The literature on optimal monetary policy in New Keynesian models under both commitment and discretion usually solves for the optimal allocations that are consistent with a rational expectations market equilibrium, but it does not study whether the policy can be implemented given the available policy instruments. Recently, King and Wolman (2004) have provided an example for which a time-consistent policy cannot be implemented through the control of nominal money balances. In particular, they find that equilibria are not unique under a money stock regime and they attribute the non-uniqueness to strategic complementarities in the price-setting process. The authors clarify how the choice of monetary policy instrument contributes to the emergence of strategic complementarities in the King and Wolman (2004) example. In particular, they show that for an alternative monetary policy instrument, namely, the nominal interest rate, there exists a unique Markov-perfect equilibrium. The authors also discuss how a time-consistent planner can implement the optimal allocation by simply announcing his policy rule in a decentralized setting.Monetary policy ; Interest rates ; Money supply

Implications of the capital-embodiment revolution for directed R&D and wage inequality

Wages ; Labor market ; Productivity

Implementation of optimal monetary policy

Monetary policy