Current Table of Contents

• Editors' Introduction
  
• Monetary Theory: Where Do We Stand?
  
• How Important Is Money in the Conduct of Monetary Policy?
  I consider some of the leading arguments for assigning an important role to tracking the growth of monetary aggregates when making decisions about monetary policy. First, I consider whether ignoring money means returning to the conceptual framework that allowed the high inflation of the 1970s. Second, I consider whether models of inflation determination with no role for money are incomplete, or inconsistent with elementary economic principles. Third, I consider the implications for monetary policy strategy of the empirical evidence for a long-run relationship between money growth and inflation. And fourth, I consider reasons why a monetary policy strategy based solely on short-run inflation forecasts derived from a Phillips curve may not be a reliable way of controlling inflation. I argue that none of these considerations provides a compelling reason to assign a prominent role to monetary aggregates in the conduct of monetary policy.
• Robustness and U.S. Monetary Policy Experimentation
  We study how a concern for robustness modifies a policymaker's incentive to experiment. A policymaker has a prior over two submodels of inflation-unemployment dynamics. One submodel implies an exploitable trade-off, the other does not. Bayes' law gives the policymaker an incentive to experiment. The policymaker fears that both submodels and his prior probability distribution over them are misspecified. We compute decision rules that are robust to misspecifications of each submodel and of the prior distribution over submodels. We compare robust rules to ones that Cogley, Colacito, and Sargent (2007) computed assuming that the models and the prior distribution are correctly specified. We explain how the policymaker's desires to protect against misspecifications of the submodels, on the one hand, and misspecifications of the prior over them, on the other, have different effects on the decision rule.
• Managing Expectations
  The idea that monetary policy is principally about "managing expectations" has taken hold in central banks around the world. Discussions of expectations management by central bankers, academics and by financial market participants frequently also include the idea that central bank credibility is imperfect. We adapt a familiar macroeconomic model so as to discuss key concepts in the area of expectations management. Our work also exemplifies a model construction approach to analyzing the dynamics of announcements, actions, and credibility that we think makes feasible a wide range of future investigations concerning the management of expectations.
• Monetary Aggregates and Liquidity in a Neo-Wicksellian Framework
  Woodford (2003) describes a popular class of neo-Wicksellian (NW) models in which monetary policy is characterized by an interest rate rule, and the money market and financial institutions are typically not even modeled. Critics contend that these models are incomplete and unsuitable for monetary policy evaluation. Our banks and bonds (BB) model starts with a standard NW model and then adds banks and a role for bonds in the liquidity management of households and banks. The BB model gives a more complete description of the economy, but the NW model has the virtue of simplicity. Our purpose here is to see if the NW model gives a reasonably accurate account of macroeconomic behavior in the more complete BB model. We do this by comparing the models' second moments, variance decompositions, and impulse response functions. We also study the role of monetary aggregates and velocity in predicting inflation in the two models.
• News and Business Cycles in Open Economies
  We study the effects of news about future total factor productivity (TFP) in a small open economy. We show that an open-economy version of the neoclassical model produces a recession in response to good news about future TFP. We propose an open-economy model that generates comovement in response to TFP news. The key elements of our model are a weak short-run wealth effect on the labor supply and adjustment costs to labor and investment. We show that our model also generates comovement in response to news about future investment-specific technical change and to "sudden stops."
• An Estimated Monetary DSGE Model with Unemployment and Staggered Nominal Wage Bargaining
  We develop and estimate a medium scale macroeconomic model that allows for unemployment and staggered nominal wage contracting. In contrast to most existing quantitative models, employment adjustment is on the extensive margin and the employment of existing workers is efficient. Wage rigidity, however, affects the hiring of new workers. The former is introduced via the staggered Nash bargaining setup of Gertler and Trigari (2006). A robust finding is that the model with wage rigidity provides a better description of the data than does a flexible wage version. Overall, the model fits the data roughly as well as existing quantitative macroeconomic models, such as Smets and Wouters (2007) or Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Evans (2005). More work is necessary, however, to ensure a robust identification of the key labor market parameters.
• Monetary Policy and Inflation in the 70s
  An influential paper by Clarida, Galí, and Gertler (2000) has attributed the great inflation of the 1970s to the violation of the Taylor principle in the conduct of U.S. monetary policy (weak, indeterminacy inducing response to expected inflation). We evaluate this thesis in the context of a standard New Keynesian model against a version of the model that incorporates incomplete information learning about the true state of the economy. The likelihood-based estimation of the model overwhelmingly favors the specification with indeterminacy over the alternatives with determinacy, independent of the presence and size of misperceptions.
• How Important Is Money in the Conduct of Monetary Policy? A Comment
  
• Why Money Growth Determines Inflation in the Long Run: Answering the Woodford Critique
  Woodford argues that it is not appropriate to regard inflation in the steady state of New Keynesian models as determined by steady-state money growth. Woodford instead argues that the intercept term in the monetary authority's interest rate policy rule determines steady-state inflation. In this paper, I offer an alternative interpretation of steady-state behavior, according to which it is appropriate to regard steady-state inflation as determined by steady-state money growth. The argument relies on traditional interpretations of the central bank's power in the long run and appeals to model properties that are common to textbook and New Keynesian analysis. According to this argument, the only way the central bank can control interest rates in the long run is via affecting inflation, and its only means available for determining inflation is by determining the money growth rate.
• INDEX TO VOLUME 40