Allan Meltzer developed his model of the monetary transmission mechanism in research conducted with Karl Brunner. The Brunner-Meltzer model implies that the Federal Reserve would benefit from drawing brighter lines between monetary and fiscal policy actions, eschewing credit market intervention and focusing, instead, on using its control over the monetary base to stabilize the aggregate price l...

In this paper we evaluate the sustainability of the current fiscal policy regime in Poland, which has been in place for almost 10 years since the start of the economic reform process. We use the intertemporal budget constraint (IBC) as a framework, and evaluate the sustainability of current policies. Consistency of fiscal policy with the IBC is evaluated using unit root and cointegration tests....

This paper computes welfare-maximizing monetary and fiscal policy rules in a real business cycle model augmented with sticky prices, a demand for money, taxation, and stochastic government consumption. We consider simple feedback rules whereby the nominal interest rate is set as a function of output and inflation, and taxes are set as a function of total government liabilities. We implement a s...

Search and matching frictions on financial and labor markets are introduced in a dynamic general equilibrium framework, affecting the dynamics of capital and employment adjustments. While prices are fully flexible and determined by money supply, money demand arises endogenously from financial market matching frictions that prevent some deposits from being channeled into productive investment. T...

Fiscal considerations and commitment drive the choice of monetary policy regime, especially for developing countries. I survey the fiscal foundations of price determination, and study the maximize-inflation-tax, interest rate rule, peg and currency board, and dollarization regime. Since nominal debt acts like equity for the government, the dollarization question is like the question whether a f...

A simple model of monetary/labor search is constructed to study Keynesian indeterminacy and optimal policy. In the model, economic agents have trouble splitting the surplus from exchange appropriately, and we consider monetary and fiscal policies that correct this Keynesian inefficiency. A Taylor rule does not imply determinacy, nor does it support an efficient outcome. Optimal policies yield a...

A Farmer-type Keynesian model is constructed to explore and exposit Keynesian ideas. The modeling innovation is to integrate Farmer’s approach with monetary exchange and to derive optimal monetary and fiscal policies. Two approaches are taken to optimal policy an approach in the spirit of New Keynesian sticky-wage-and-price models, and an a "sophisticated policy" approach. Optimal policies typi...

This paper studies existence and uniqueness of equilibrium in a monetary model in which fiscal policy is Ricardian. The innovation of the paper is to model agents’ expectations as endogenous probabilities which are determined in equilibrium. Since economies with a Ricardian fiscal policy typically exhibit indeterminacy of equilibrium when the monetary policy instrument is the short-term interes...

In the United States, eradication of persistent federal deficits has won broad bipartisan support. At the same time, political pressures have mounted to strengthen the Federal Reserve's explicit concern with price stability. Proposals under consideration would require a much narrower focus on the part of Fed policymakers, and could be interpreted as targeting the price level rather than a negli...