With the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, any pretense of a connection of the world's currencies to any real commodity has been abandoned. Yet since the 1980s, most central banks have abandoned money-growth targets as practical guidelines for monetary policy as well. How then can pure "fiat" currencies be managed so as to create confidence in the stability of national units of account? Interest and Prices seeks to provide theoretical foundations for a rule-based approach to monetary policy suitable for a world of instant communications and ever more efficient financial markets. In such a world, effective monetary policy requires that central banks construct a conscious and articulate account of what they are doing. Michael Woodford reexamines the foundations of monetary economics, and shows how interest-rate policy can be used to achieve an inflation target in the absence of either commodity backing or control of a monetary aggregate. The book further shows how the tools of modern macroeconomic theory can be used to design an optimal inflation-targeting regime--one that balances stabilization goals with the pursuit of price stability in a way that is grounded in an explicit welfare analysis, and that takes account of the "New Classical" critique of traditional policy evaluation exercises. It thus argues that rule-based policymaking need not mean adherence to a rigid framework unrelated to stabilization objectives for the sake of credibility, while at the same time showing the advantages of rule-based over purely discretionary policymaking.

Interest and Prices: Foundations of a Theory of Monetary Policy

We construct a quantitative equilibrium model with firms setting prices in a staggered fashion and use it to ask whether monetary shocks can generate business cycle fluctuations. These fluctuations include persistent movements in output along with the other defining features of business cycles, like volatile investment and smooth consumption. We assume that prices are exogenously sticky for a short time. Persistent output fluctuations require endogenous price stickiness in the sense that firms choose not to change prices much when they can do so. We find that for a wide range of parameter values, the amount of endogenous stickiness is small. Thus, we find that in a standard quantitative model, staggered price-setting, alone, does not generate business cycle fluctuations.

Sticky Price Models of the Business Cycle: Can the Contract Multiplier Solve the Persistence Problem? : Impulse Response Tables and Additional Files

This paper studies the business cycle in Germany using the HP-filter (Hodrick/Prescott (1997)) to isolate the cyclical component. A two-country International Business Cycle model in line with Baxter/Crucini (1995) is built to explain these facts. The combination of GHH-preferences with taste shocks resulting from government consumption is shown to be an important feature of the German business cycle. A VAR model for the exogenous variables is estimated that enables the model not only to account well for the observed positive international correlations of outputs, consumptions and savings but also for their lead-lag relationship. Hours worked and investments are positively correlated in this model - a property not realized in other single-good models of the International Business Cycle in the literature.

/pdf/stylized-facts-and-international-business-cycles-the-german-2r8oc88bud.pdf

Stylized Facts and International Business Cycles - The German Case

Recently macroeconomists have intensified their efforts to develop models that are able to generate persistent reactions of real variables to monetary shocks in stochastic DGE models with nominal rigidities. This has proven to be quite difficult in models with price staggering only. Most papers show that output is above steady state only as long as prices are fixed for the firms. In this article particular attention is given to the role of money demand and to the form of the utility function. I consider cash-in-advance- (CIA) as well as money-in-theutility-function- (MIU) models, with CRRA and GHH preferences, to evaluate their ability to generate persistence. Persistent reactions emerge only with a high value of the elasticity of labor supply with respect to the real wage and an interest rate sensitive money demand function. CIA-models generally create more persistence than MIUmodels. In the CIA-setup a CRRA utility function generates more persistence than GHH preferences. The results highlight the importance of the way money is introduced in a New Neoclassical Synthesis

https://www.wiwi.uni-siegen.de/gail/forschung/dp96_01r.pdf

Persistency and Money Demand Distortions in a Stochastic DGE Model with Sticky Prices

This paper examines the role of habit persistence in consumption in explaining persistent responses of inflation and output to money growth shocks. A monetary stochastic dynamic general equilibrium (DGE) model with a money-in-the-utility-function (MIU-) setup is augmented by habit formation in consumption and evaluated for both Taylor and Calvo price staggering. It is shown that in the benchmark Taylor price staggering model consumption displays a persistent response while the volatility falls short empirical estimates. The reaction of most other aggregates including output, inflation and prices is counterfactually cyclical. Investment, labor hours and the real wage are too strongly correlated with output. In the benchmark Calvo price staggering model consumption is hump-shaped. Most variables are persistent and consumption shows a higher standard deviation. In sum, habit persistence in consumption improves the model outcome with respect to consumption's reaction while Calvo staggering improves the ability of a DGE model to explain persistent reactions of the other macroeconomic aggregates to money growth shocks.

Habit Persistence in Consumption in a Sticky Price Model of the Business Cycle

Recently macroeconomic researchers have begun studying models of optimal monetary policy within the Real Business Cycle (RBC) framework. A standard RBC model is augmented by New Keynesian elements like sticky prices and monopolistically competitive firms. The monetary authority acts as a social planner maximizing the utility of a representative agent while at the same time taking care of the optimal price setting behavior of the firms via an implementation constraint. King and Wolman, 1999 analyze the outcome of such a model with respect to the appropriate monetary policy of the central bank. They conclude that the central bank achieves a complete stabilization of the price level. Inflation is not only constant at the steady state but also through time. It is shown that this very special result does not hold under alternative preference specifications that allow for a richer set of substitution effects between consumption and labor.

/pdf/optimal-monetary-policy-in-an-optimizing-stochastic-dynamic-2qh38ri443.pdf

Optimal Monetary Policy in an Optimizing Stochastic Dynamic Model with Sticky Prices

In this paper a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium (DGE) model with capital accumulation is augmented by sticky wages. Wages are set in a staggered way as in Taylor (1980) implying that the optimal wage will be set for two periods. Prices are also sticky since there are adjustments cost of prices as in Rotemberg (1982). It is confirmed that wage staggering has a higher potential to generate persistent output responses to a money growth shock. Interestingly, adjustment costs of capital contribute strongly to output persistence. If it is not costly to adjust capital there is no output persistence at all. Price adjustment costs can strengthen the effects of money growth shocks on output in the presence of costly capital adjustment.

/pdf/sticky-wages-in-a-stochastic-dge-model-of-the-business-cycle-erdcfmck89.pdf

Sticky Wages in a Stochastic DGE Model of the Business Cycle

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