There is empirical evidence that government actions and interventions prolonged and worsened the financial crisis, because they were based on faulty diagnosis of the problem and did not follow clear predictable principles

Much of the recent economic debate about the impact of stimulus packages has focused on the size of the crucial government purchases multiplier. But equally crucial is the size of the government purchases multiplicand--the change in government purchases of goods and services that the multiplier...

In this paper we investigate the comparative properties of empirically-estimated monetary models of the U.S. economy. We make use of a new database of models designed for such investigations. We focus on three representative models: the Christiano, Eichenbaum, Evans (2005) model, the Smets and...

Why legislate a policy rule now? Because monetary policy has recently become more discretionary, more short-term focused. My research shows that discretionary actions were, on balance, harmful. But even if one disagrees, such actions should raise concerns about a monetary system in which a great...

A solution method and an estimation method for nonlinear rational expectations models are presented in this paper. The solution method can be used in forecasting and policy applications and can handle models with serial correlation and multiple viewpoint dates. When applied to linear models, the...

This paper examines several episodes in U.S. monetary history using the framework of an interest rate rule for monetary policy. The main finding is that a monetary policy rule in which the interest rate responds to inflation and real output more aggressively than it did in the 1960s and 1970s,...