This paper is about the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, between 1947 and 1982. The paper has the form of a conversation between the two authors and covers issues such as the existence of a "Chicago School," the Department's governance, the personalities of some well-known...

Lucas (1972) was a paper that permanently changed the course of macroeconomics, even though its "money supply surprise" model lost its central place in the area within a decade because of empirical difficulties. However, Lucas's novel methodology, based on clearing markets and rational...

This paper is about the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, between 1947 and 1982. The paper has the form of a conversation between the two authors and covers issues such as the existence of a "Chicago School," the Department's governance, the personalities of some well-known...

Whenever inflation rears its head, the call soon comes to raise interest rates. The rationale is simple. Higher interest rates put a damper on the supply of money. And this monetary clamp slows inflation. It’s so intuitive that it must be true. Or is it? As the Reverend Brooke observes, it...

If you’re just tuning in, I’ve spent the last few months debunking some common misconceptions about inflation: Is inflation a uniform increase in prices? No. Inflation is wildly differential. Is inflation driven by an ‘over-heated’ economy? No. Inflation tends to come with economic...

Milton Friedman's longstanding advocacy in favor of floating exchange rates has contributed to a mistaken belief that he opposed currency board regimes or outright dollarization. Nothing could be further from the truth. Over a period of almost five decades Friedman consistently made it clear...

Sargent and Wallace (S-W) show that, even when inflation is prima facie a strictly monetary phenomenon -- prices are flexible, markets clear and velocity is constant -- inflation is, in the long run, a fiscal phenomenon. This follows from the government budget constraint and the existence of an...

Given the current state of technology, agents could potentially deal with exchange by transferring directly Central Bank fiat monies. Are we close to private banks becoming “technologically obsolete” in the provision of payment services?. To provide insights into this question, we build a...

This paper discusses monetarist objections to the IS-LM model. We explore the views of two principal spokesmen for monetarism: Milton Friedman and the team of Karl Brunner and Allan Meltzer. Friedman did not explicitly state the reasons he generally chose not to use the IS-LM model in rejecting...

In many countries, inflation has become less responsive to domestic factors and more responsive to global factors over the past decades. We introduce money and credit into the workhorse open-economy New Keynesian model. With this framework, we show that: (i) an efficient forecast of domestic...

This paper analyzes the evolution of Milton Friedman’s thinking about bailouts. It covers bailouts of commercial banks, shadow banks and other financial firms, manufacturing firms, governments, financial markets, and other cases where the term is commonly used. It is based on his academic...

This paper provides a critical discussion of monetarism and the difficulties of understanding macroeconomic developments after the publication of Friedman and Schwartz’s classic 1965 article through a monetarist lens, especially for the period following the great financial crisis. This paper...

This paper is about the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, between 1947 and 1982. The paper has the form of a conversation between the two authors and covers issues such as the existence of a "Chicago School," the Department's governance, the personalities of some well-known...

Lucas (1972) was a paper that permanently changed the course of macroeconomics, even though its "money supply surprise" model lost its central place in the area within a decade because of empirical difficulties. However, Lucas's novel methodology, based on clearing markets and rational...

This paper is about the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, between 1947 and 1982. The paper has the form of a conversation between the two authors and covers issues such as the existence of a "Chicago School," the Department's governance, the personalities of some well-known...

This paper rejects the proposition that there is only a single interesting question to ask about the decade of the 1930s. It is concerned not only with the role of money in the 1929-33 contraction but also with the relative role of monetary and nonmonetary factors in the recession of 1937-38 and...

This paper constructs a dynamic macroeconomic model with less- than-perfect price flexibility which has a real side consistent with Real Business Cycle Theory, augmented by investment adjustment costs, increasing returns to scale, and a new, flexible formalization of imperfect competition. A new...

Sargent and Wallace (1981) published "Some Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic" 40 years ago. Their central message was that a central bank may not have the power to determine the long-run rate of inflation without fiscal support. In a policy regime where the fiscal authority is non-Ricardian, an...

Mark Ramseyer has been a leading force in bringing to bear the methods of Law and Economics to an increasingly ambitious analysis of the Japanese legal and economic systems. He has deliberately assumed an iconoclastic position in debunking a number of widely-held beliefs about Japan. More...

Recent experience does not include a "monetarist experiment," as some have argued, but may slightly reinforce preexisting reasons for doubting that the best way of formulating monetarist policy prescriptions is in the form of a constant growth rule for the money stock.A more desirable rule would...

This paper investigates whether the Bank of Japan has practiced a monetarist rule since 1975. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) published a report in 1975, stating that it would pay close attention to money supply (M2), and in 1978 started announcing quarterly the "forecast" (targets) of monetary (M2)...

When monthly data on production, prices, and the money stock are interpreted, via a vector autoregression, as generated by dynamic responses to "surprises" in each of the variables, a remarkable similarity in dynamics between interwar and postwar business cycles emerges, though the size of the...

This paper is about the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, between 1947 and 1982. The paper has the form of a conversation between the two authors and covers issues such as the existence of a “Chicago School,” the Department’s governance, the personalities of some...

Given the influence of Milton Friedman ,it is hard to keep from identifying "monetarisms" with the advocacy of a policy rule that would require the money stock to grow at a constant rate and prohibit cyclical adjustments in government spending or in tax schedules. This identification is somewhat...

We discuss the monetary institutions and macroeconomics of centrally planned economies (CPEs) ; objectives and techniques of monetary control; the relevance to CPEs of the neutrality property, the natural rate hypothesis, and the quantity theory; the roles of stock .and flow variables and the...

The Covid-19 crisis has revived an old heated debate on whether significant increases in the money supply -such as the ones accompanying central banks' unconventional policies- ultimately lead to higher inflation. Some observers have alluded to the quantity theory of money for that purpose,...

When limited commitment hinders unsecured credit, assets help by serving as collateral. We study models where assets differ in pledgability - the extent to which they can be used to secure loans - and hence liquidity. Although many previous analyses of imperfect credit focus on producers, we...

The coronavirus pandemic of 2019-20 confronted fiscally dominant regimes around the world with the question of whether the large deficits caused by the health crisis should be monetized or financed by issuing debt. The unpleasant monetarist arithmetic of Sargent and Wallace (1981) states that in...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the intellectual roots of monetary dominance; specifically, the view that fiscal policy is largely irrelevant to counter-cyclical macro stabilisation and long-run output growth. A first step towards monetary dominance was the monetarist reinterpretation of...

We investigate how the Mundell-Tobin effect, i.e., a positive relation between in ation and capital investment, changes the optimal monetary policy prescription in a framework that combines overlapping generations and new monetarist models. We find that the Friedman rule is optimal if and only...

The paper compares the welfare properties of two competing organizations of the monetary system: The current fractional reserve banking system versus a narrow banking system where inside money is fully backed by outside money issued by the central bank. Using a New Monetarist model, the analysis...

We develop a New Monetarist model in continuous time where agents trade continuously in competitive markets and infrequently in pairwise meetings. Agents can produce and consume both in flows over time intervals and in discrete quantities at points in time. We detail the methodology to solve...

A 1970 New York Times essay on corporate social responsibility by Milton Friedman is often said to have launched a shareholder-focused reorientation of managerial priorities in America's public companies. The essay correspondingly is a primary target of those critical of a shareholder-centric...

The libertarian defense of free enterprise, free trade, and freedom from government regulations and controls is grounded in a normative commitment to individual freedom. The majority of the economics profession, including the Chicago School, are committed in the first instance to methodological...

In many countries, inflation has become less responsive to domestic factors and more responsive to global factors over the past decades. We introduce money and credit into the workhorse open-economy New Keynesian model. With this framework, we show that: (i) an efficient forecast of domestic...