We develop a simple semistructural model for the Rwandan economy to better understand the monetary policy transmission mechanism. A key feature of the model is the introduction of a modified uncovered interest parity condition to capture key structural features of Rwanda’s economy and...

Africa will account for 80 percent of the projected 4 billion increase in the global population by 2100. The accompanying increase in its working age population creates a window of opportunity, which if properly harnessed, can translate into higher growth and yield a demographic dividend. We...

In a recent paper, Michael Kiley argued that the Calvo model of price adjustment is both quantitatively and qualitatively different from the Taylor model. What we show is that Kiley (along with most other people) are choosing the wrong parameterization to compare the two models. In effect they...

We estimate and compare two models, the Generalized Taylor Economy (GTE) and the Multiple Calvo model (MC), that have been built to model the distributions of contract lengths observed in the data. We compare the performances of these models to those of the standard models such as the Calvo and...

I embed the pricing model proposed by Dixon and Kara (2011a, b) (i.e. a Generalized Taylor Economy (GTE)) into a state of the art instance of New Keynesian economics (e.g. Christiano, Eichenbaum and Evans (2005) and Smets and Wouters (2007)). The GTE is built to account for one of the most...

Using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model that accounts for credit constraints, we study the effects of fiscal stimulus on the macroeconomy. We show that the presence of credit constraints results in larger fiscal multipliers than indicated by the standard DSGE models. If...

In this paper, we use the generalized Taylor economy (GTE) framework to examine the optimal choice of inflation index. In this otherwise standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model, there can be many sectors, each with a different contract length. In the GTE framework with an...

We develop the generalized Taylor economy (GTE) in which there are many sectors with overlapping contracts of different lengths. In economies with the same average contract length, monetary shocks will be more persistent when longer contracts are present. Using the Bils-Klenow distribution of...

This paper adopts the impulse-response methodology to understand inflation persistence. It has often been argued that existing models of pricing fail to explain the persistence that we observe. We adopt a common general framework that allows for an explicit modeling of the distribution of...

Bils, Klenow and Malin (2009) recently constructed an empirical measure of reset price in.ation (i.e. the rate of change of all ‘desired’ prices) for the US economy, by using the micro-data underpinning the CPI and evaluated whether the existing pricing models can explain both the observed...