From 1975 to 1980, inflation in core (nonfood and nonenergy) consumer prices rose sharply as crude oil prices more than tripled. Yet, as crude oil prices quadrupled from late 2001 to 2007, core consumer price inflation remained essentially flat. Some observers have attributed the stability of...

Over the course of the recovery from the 2001 recession, many forecasters have revised downward their expectations for job growth in the United States. The often disappointing pace of employment growth has been attributed to various forces, such as the high health-care costs faced by employers,...

Previous studies have found that subordinated debt (sub-debt) markets do differentiate between banks with different risk profiles. This finding satisfies a necessary condition for regulatory proposals which would mandate increased reliance on sub-debt in the bank capital structure to discipline...

During the Great Recession, the government provided large fiscal stimulus in an economic environment characterized by a high degree of uncertainty on the future course of the economy while the nominal interest rate was constrained at the zero lower bound. While many papers have analyzed the...

This paper characterizes optimal government spending when monetary policy is constrained by the zero lower bound under a variety of assumptions about a set of fiscal instruments available to finance government spending. The private sector of the model is given by a standard New Keynesian model....

This paper studies credible policies in a New Keynesian economy in which the nominal interest rate is subject to the ZLB constraint and contractionary shocks hit the economy occasionally. The Ramsey policy involves keeping the policy rate low even after the shock disappears, but the central bank...

Appointing Rogoff's (1985) conservative central banker improves welfare if the economy is subject to large contractionary shocks and the policy rate occasionally falls to the zero lower bound (ZLB). In an economy with occasionally binding ZLB constraints, the anticipation of future ZLB episodes...

The presence of the lagged shadow policy rate in the interest rate feedback rule reduces the government spending multiplier nontrivially when the policy rate is constrained at the zero lower bound (ZLB). In the economy with policy inertia, increased inflation and output due to higher government...

Can the central bank credibly commit to keeping the nominal interest rate low for an extended period of time in the aftermath of a deep recession? By analyzing credible plans in a sticky-price economy with occasionally binding zero lower bound constraints, I find that the answer is yes if...

This paper examines how the presence of uncertainty alters allocations and prices when the nominal interest rate is constrained by the zero lower bound. I conduct the analysis using a standard New Keynesian model in which the nominal interest rate is determined according to a truncated Taylor...