Early in his career, Milton Friedman proposed a coordinated rules-based approach to monetary and fiscal policy, which he then abandoned for a simple constant money growth rule. Both rules were motivated by his goal of long-run economic stability and his belief that discretionary policy would be...

Recent experience with the coronavirus has raised important questions about the preparedness of governments for such an event. However, an important question as it pertains to preparedness is determining how much a government should be willing to spend each year in order to prevent a pandemic...

The recent proliferation of bitcoin has been a boon for users but might pose problems for governments. Indeed, some governments have already taken steps to ban or discourage the use of bitcoin. In a model with endogenous matching and random consumption preferences, we find multiple monetary...

How do we ensure that public infrastructure is properly and adequately maintained and replaced? How can we ensure that the allocation of infrastructure spending is not motivated by the political process? In this paper, I present an option value approach that offers an answer to both questions...

The theory of capital developed by Bohm-Bawerk and Wicksell emphasized the roundabout nature of the production process. The basic insight is that production necessarily involves time. One element of the production process is to determine the period of production, or the length of time from the...

The real option literature on investment provides insights into firms' decisions to enter and exit markets. This literature emphasizes the role of fixed costs of entry, the salvage value of exit, and uncertainty. A major implication of this literature is that it is often optimal to wait....

Over the last several years, the Federal Reserve has conducted a series of large scale asset purchases. The effectiveness of these purchases is dependent on the monetary transmission mechanism. Former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke argued that large scale asset purchases are effective...

In this paper we provide a framework for determining when it is optimal to move when labor market opportunities are declining. We model the decision to migrate as akin to owning a financial option in which the exercise price is the fixed cost of moving. We show that a higher fixed cost...

The Bullionist Controversy in the United Kingdom is one of the first debates about the determination of the price level and the exchange rate under a paper money standard. Despite the importance of the debate in the development of monetary theory, there remains little empirical evidence that...