Monetary policy affects both real variables, such as employment, unemployment and output, and nominal variables, such as nominal interest and inflation rates. For close to a decade, the principal focus of monetary policy has been on inflation. During a recession, or when one appears imminent, the state of real variables such as GDP growth has been a paramount consideration, but at other times, ...

Stylized facts on U.S. output and interest rates have so far proved hard to match with simple DSGE models. I estimate covariances between output, nominal and real interest rate conditional on structural shocks, since such evidence has largely been lacking in previous discussions of the output-interest rate puzzle. Conditional on shocks to technology and monetary policy, the results square with ...

This paper focuses on how inflation interacts with taxes and interest rates to affect capital formation.1 It uses a simple credit-market framework to explain how inflation magnifies the distorting effects of taxation when the tax treatment of interest income and expense is not fully indexed to inflation.2 The distortion involves a real tax wedge consisting of the difference between the real int...

The determinants of money velocity are theoretically explored under various assumptions of interest rate uncertainty in a monetary general equilibrium model. Money is introduced by putting monetary services in the utility function. Monetary assets pay interest. When interest rates are uncertain, it is found that the degree of risk aversion in consumers' preferences and the risk in the return ra...

This paper studies the joint business cycle dynamics of inflation, money growth, nominal and real interest rates and the velocity of money. I extend and estimate a standard cash and credit monetary model by adding idiosyncratic preference shocks to cash consumption as well as a banking sector. The estimated model accounts very well for the business cycle data, a finding that standard monetary m...

We construct stationary Markov equilibria for an economy with fiat money, one nondurable commodity, countably-many time periods, and a continuum of agents. The total production of commodity remains constant, but individual agents’ endowments fluctuate in a random fashion from period to period. In order to hedge against these random fluctuations, agents find it useful to hold fiat money which th...