The classic models of staggered adjustment of Taylor and Blanchard takes the frequency of price or wage adjustment as exogenous. This paper develops a model in which the frequency of price changes in endogenous. It then uses the model to analyze the effects of changes in the parameters of the...

While there is ample evidence that high inflation is harmful, little is known about how best to reduce inflation or how far it should be reduced. In this volume, sixteen distinguished economists analyze the appropriateness of low inflation as a goal for monetary policy and discuss possible...

Rigidities in real prices are not sufficient to create rigidities in nominal prices and real effects of nominal shocks. And, by themselves, small frictions in nominal adjustment, such as costs of changing prices, create only small non-neutralities. But this paper shows that substantial nominal...

ADVANCED MACROECONOMICS Third Edition David Romer University of California, Berkeley McGraw-Hill Irwin Boston Burr Ridge, IL Dubuque, IA Madison, Wl New York San Francisco St. Louis Bangkok...

Most empirical papers in economics focus on two aspects of their results: whether the estimates are statistically significantly different from zero and the interpretation of the point estimates. This focus obscures important information about the implications of the results for economically...

This paper considers fiscal policy during the pandemic through the lens of optimal social insurance. We develop a simple framework to analyze how government taxes and transfers could mimic the insurance against pandemic income losses that people would like to have had. Permutations of the...

There have been large changes in the conduct of aggregate demand policy in the United States over the past fifty years. This paper shows that these changes in policy have resulted largely from changes in policymakers' beliefs about the functioning of the economy and the effects of policy. We...

This paper analyzes the contributions of monetary and fiscal policy to postwar economic recoveries. We find that the Federal Reserve typically responds to downturns with prompt and large reductions in interest rates. Discretionary fiscal policy, in contrast, rarely reacts before the trough in...

Conventional measures of monetary policy, such as the federal funds rate, are surely influenced by forces other than monetary policy. More importantly, central banks adjust policy in response to a wide range of information about future economic developments. As a result, estimates of the effects...