The primary goal of Federal Reserve monetary policy is to foster maximum long-term growth in the U.S. economy by achieving price stability over time. Price stability will be achieved, according to some definitions, when inflation ceases to be a factor in the decision-making processes of...

From early 1994 to early 1995, inflation surged in the producer price indexes for crude materials and intermediate goods. For example, inflation in intermediate goods prices rose from 2.6 percent annually in the first half of 1994 to 7.1 percent over the next nine months. At the same time,...

The primary goal of Federal Reserve monetary policy is to foster maximum long-term growth in the U.S. economy by achieving price stability over time. Price stability will be achieved, according to some definitions, when inflation ceases to be a factor in the decision-making processes of...

This paper reexamines whether producer prices help predict consumer prices, focusing on model stability and the forecasting performance of time-varying parameter models. In bivariate models, producer price inflation consistently Granger-causes consumer price inflation in-sample but fails to...

This paper examines the responses of prices at different stages of production to an explicitly identified demand shock: a monetary policy shock. The frameworks of Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Evans (1994, 1996) and Sims and Zha (1995b) are used to identify the policy shock as the innovation to...

Conventional investigations of the "best" intermediate target variable for monetary policy have used a single criterion: the best fit between the behavior of an aggregate and that of some goal variable such as nominal spending or the aggregate price level. Ignored in this type of study, however,...

In the P-star model the price level is determined by the money stock per unit of potential output and the long-run equilibrium level of the velocity of money. This article applies this model to Austria. Problems in identifying permanent shocks to potential output and/or velocity lead to the...

This paper finds that standard asset pricing models fail to explain the significantly positive delta hedging errors from writing options on foreign exchange futures. Foreign exchange volatility does influence stock returns, however. The volatility of the JPY/USD exchange rate predicts the time...

This paper shows that incomplete information can be a rich source of sunspots equilibria. This is demonstrated in a standard dynamic general equilibrium model of monopolistic competition … la Dixit-Stiglitz. In the absence of fundamental shocks, the model has a unique certainty (fundamental)...

Price rigidity is the key mechanism for propagating business cycles in traditional Keynesian theory. Yet the New Keynesian literature has failed to show that sticky prices by themselves can effectively propagate business cycles in general equilibrium. We show that price rigidity in fact can (by...