Central banks no longer set the short-term interest rates that they use for monetary policy purposes by manipulating the supply of banking system reserves, as in conventional economics textbooks; this process normally involves little or no variation in the supply of central bank liabilities. In...

One of the most significant changes in monetary economics in recent years has been the virtual disappearance of what was once a dominant focus on money, and in parallel the disappearance of the LM curve as part of the analytical framework that economists use to think about issues of monetary...

Central banks no longer set the short-term interest rates that they use for monetary policy purposes by manipulating the supply of banking system reserves, as in conventional economics textbooks; today this process involves little or no variation in the supply of central bank liabilities. In...

Monetary policymakers normally seek to achieve multiple objectives: for prices as well as real economic activity, sometimes for the composition of real activity as well as the aggregate, and often for aspects of the economy's international balance. The fact that monetary policy has only one...

The author argues that inequality, combined with only modest growth, can have grave moral consequences. History suggests that, in the past, a rising standard of living has promoted tolerance for others, commitment to economic opportunity, and democracy. But stagnating incomes due to inequality...

A feature of U.S. postwar business cycle experience that is by now widely documented is the tendency of the spread between the respective interest rates on commercial paper and Treasury bills to widen shortly before the onset of recessions. By contrast, the paper—bill spread did not...

The standard workhorse models of monetary policy now commonly in use, both for teaching macro- economics to students and for supporting policymaking within many central banks, are incapable of incorporating the most widely accepted accounts of how the 2007–9 financial crisis occurred and...

This paper outlines an optimization framework which extends the familiar Tinbergen-Theil model in two ways. First, a "piecewise quadratic" replaces the standard quadratic objective function. Second, the time horizon of the optimization becomes, within the context of economic stabilization...