In their classic 1999 paper, Monetary policy shocks: What have we learned and to what end?, Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Evans (CEE) investigate one of the most widely used methods for identifying monetary policy shocks of its time. Unfortunately, their approach is no longer viable, at least not...

Does Friedman’s k-percent rule guarantee a unique equilibrium outcome? We show analytically the answer to this question is sensitive to the method of aggregation. Focusing on broad measures of money, we show that fixing the growth rate of the true monetary aggregate will generate a unique...

This paper analyzes optimal monetary policy in a standard New-Keynesian model augmented with a financial sector. The banks in the model are subject to shocks which impede their ability and willingness to produce financial assets. We show these financial market supply shocks decrease both the...

We decompose a 219 year sample of U.S. real output data into permanent and transitory shocks. We find reductions in volatility of output growth and inflation, starting in the mid 1980s, consistent with the “Great Moderation” noted by many others. More importantly, we find periods of even...

Annual changes in volatility of U.S. real output growth and inflation are documented in data from 1870 to 2009 using a time varying parameter VAR model. Both volatilities rise quickly with World War I and its aftermath, stay relatively high until the end of World War II and drop rapidly until...

Changes in volatility of output growth and inflation are examined for eight countries with at least 140 years of uninterrupted data. Time-varying parameter vector autoregressions are used to estimate standard deviations of each variable. Both volatilities rise quickly with World War I and its...

Bank regulators acknowledge that large U.S. commercial banks allocate considerably more resources to originating and trading off-balance sheet assets than their smaller counter parts. In this paper: (i) I show the asset concentration in these large banks moves closely with home prices due to the...

We design a procedure for measuring the United States capital stock of money implied by the Divisia monetary aggregate service flow, in a manner consistent with the present-value model of economic capital stock. We permit non-martingale expectations and time varying discount rates. Based on...

We measure the United States capital stock of money implied by the Divisia monetary aggregate service flow, in a manner consistent with the present-value model of economic capital stock and asset pricing theory. The resulting measures differ substantially from the usual simple sum accounting...

Measuring the economic stock of money, defined to be the present value of current and future monetary service flows, is a difficult asset pricing problem, because most monetary assets yield interest. Thus, an interest yielding monetary asset is a joint product: a durable good providing a...