Credit booms sometimes lead to financial crises which are accompanied with severe and persistent economic slumps. Does this imply that monetary policy should “lean against the wind” and counteract excess credit growth, even at the cost of higher output and inflation volatility? We study this...

This paper reconsiders a result obtained by Sargent and Wallace, namely, that price level indeterminacy obtains in their well-known model if the monetary authorities adopt a policy feedback rule for the interest rate rather than the money stock. Since the Federal Reserve seems often to have used...

In October 1979 the Federal Reserve shifted from an interest rate oriented operating procedure to a reserves oriented procedure. It is argued in this paper that part of the very large increase in interest rate volatility which resulted from the policy switch may have been due to shifts in the...

The recent consensus view, that the gold standard was the leading cause of the worldwide Great Depression 1929-33, stems from two propositions: (1) Under the gold standard, deflationary shocks were transmitted between countries and, (2) for most countries, continued adherence to gold prevented...

The paper examines the case for activist monetary policy. It accepts the view that expectations are formed rationally, but not the implication of flexible price, equilibrium, rational expectations models, that monetary policy cannot and should not be used to affect real magnitudes. The paper...

We explore the effects of official targeting policy on the term-structure of nominal interest rates, adapting relevant insights from theoretical work on "peso problems" to account for realistic infrequency of target changes. Our analysis of daily U.S. interest rates and newly available...

The purpose of this paper is to review and evaluate the most important existing criticisms of policy strategies that feature adherence to money stock targets. Four main categories of criticism (and counterargumerits) are analyzed. The first of these involves the claim that accurate money stock...

This paper studies the possibility of using the broad monetary aggregate M2 to target the quarterly rate of growth of nominal GDP. Our findings indicate that the Federal Reserve could probably guide M2 in a way that reduces not only the long-term average rate of inflation but also the variance...

This paper studies some continuous-time cash-in-advance models in which interest rate smoothing is optimal. We consider both deterministic and stochastic models. In the stochastic case we obtain two results of independent interest: (i) we study what is, to our knowledge, the only version of the...