This paper analyzes the quantitative significance of Sargent and Wallace's (1981) "Some Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic" in a model that is parameterized to correspond with U.S. data. The major result is that the monetarist arithmetic is not overly unpleasant and that the nominal side of the...

Recently there has been renewed interest in using general equilibrium models to understand the effects of monetary policy on interest rates and real economic activity. This research effort involved the search for models that will account for the liquidity effects -- the decrease in short-term...

This paper studies the effects of fiscal policies -- depicted as stochastic changes in government spending and distortionary tax rates -- when the government is constrained from using lump sum taxes for achieving intertemporal budget balance. The ratio of debt to gnp, therefore, has consequences...

This paper presents a general equilibrium monetary model in which inflation distorts a variety of marginal decisions. Although individually none of the distortions is very large, they combine to yield substantial welfare cost estimates. A sustained 4% inflation like that experienced in the U.S....

Real business cycle models have recently been applied to settings in which equilibria are suboptimal. In most models the solutions are approximated using some type of linearization with little attention being given to the accuracy of the approximation. In this paper we investigate three...

The Economic Recovery Act of 1981 led to the largest postwar decline in effective tax rates on capital. The legislation also had its most significant effect on rates in 1982 due to the rapid decline in inflation. Although some of the tax cut was rescinded in 1982, effective corporate tax rates...

The behavior of the Federal Reserve System can be characterized as secretive with respect to its control of monetary aggregates. One common justification for this secrecy is that markets will overreact to information, causing undue variability in interest rates. However, the consequences of...