Collected Papers on Monetary Theory


Book Description

Robert Lucas is one of the outstanding monetary theorists of the past hundred years. Along with Knut Wicksell, Irving Fisher, John Maynard Keynes, James Tobin, and Milton Friedman (his teacher), Lucas revolutionized our understanding of how money interacts with the real economy of production, consumption, and exchange. Lucas’s contributions are both methodological and substantive. Methodologically, he developed dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium models to analyze economic decision-makers operating through time in a complex, probabilistic environment. Substantively, he incorporated the quantity theory of money into these models and derived its implications for money growth, inflation, and interest rates in the long run. He also showed the different effects of anticipated and unanticipated changes in the stock of money on economic fluctuations, and helped to demonstrate that there was not a long-run trade-off between unemployment and inflation (the Phillips curve) that policy-makers could exploit. The twenty-one papers collected in this volume fall primarily into three categories: core monetary theory and public finance, asset pricing, and the real effects of monetary instability. Published between 1972 and 2007, they will inspire students and researchers who want to study the work of a master of economic modeling and to advance economics as a pure and applied science.







The Effectiveness of Fiscal Policy in Stimulating Economic Activity


Book Description

This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the effectiveness of fiscal policy. The focus is on the size of fiscal multipliers, and on the possibility that multipliers can turn negative (i.e., that fiscal contractions can be expansionary). The paper concludes that fiscal multipliers are overwhelmingly positive but small. However, there is some evidence of negative fiscal multipliers.




NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2003


Book Description

The NBER Macroeconomics Annual presents pioneering work in macroeconomics by leading academic researchers to an audience of public policymakers and the academic community. Each commissioned paper is followed by comments and discussion. This year's edition provides a mix of cutting-edge research and policy analysis on such topics as productivity and information technology, the increase in wealth inequality, behavioral economics, and inflation.




From Optimal Tax Theory to Tax Policy


Book Description

The author examines the role of optimal tax analysis in informing and influencing tax policy design.




The Great Inflation


Book Description

Controlling inflation is among the most important objectives of economic policy. By maintaining price stability, policy makers are able to reduce uncertainty, improve price-monitoring mechanisms, and facilitate more efficient planning and allocation of resources, thereby raising productivity. This volume focuses on understanding the causes of the Great Inflation of the 1970s and ’80s, which saw rising inflation in many nations, and which propelled interest rates across the developing world into the double digits. In the decades since, the immediate cause of the period’s rise in inflation has been the subject of considerable debate. Among the areas of contention are the role of monetary policy in driving inflation and the implications this had both for policy design and for evaluating the performance of those who set the policy. Here, contributors map monetary policy from the 1960s to the present, shedding light on the ways in which the lessons of the Great Inflation were absorbed and applied to today’s global and increasingly complex economic environment.




Fiscal Policy and Long-Term Growth


Book Description

This paper explores how fiscal policy can affect medium- to long-term growth. It identifies the main channels through which fiscal policy can influence growth and distills practical lessons for policymakers. The particular mix of policy measures, however, will depend on country-specific conditions, capacities, and preferences. The paper draws on the Fund’s extensive technical assistance on fiscal reforms as well as several analytical studies, including a novel approach for country studies, a statistical analysis of growth accelerations following fiscal reforms, and simulations of an endogenous growth model.




Numerical Methods and Applications


Book Description

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of NMA 2006 held in Borovets, Bulgaria. Coverage in the 84 revised full papers includes numerical methods for hyperbolic problems, robust preconditioning solution methods, metaheuristics for optimization problems, uncertain/control systems and reliable numerics, interpolation and quadrature processes, and large-scale computations in environmental modeling.




International Macroeconomic Dynamics


Book Description

International Macroeconomic Dynamics provides extensive applications of important macroeconomic dynamic models to the international economy. For a long time, the study of macroeconomics has focused almost exclusively on a closed economy and downplayed the role of international transactions. Today, however, researchers recognize that one cannot fully understand domestic macroeconomic relationships without considering the global economy within which each country operates. Increasingly, economists are treating international transactions as an integral part of the macroeconomic system, and international macroeconomics has become an area of intensive research activity. International Macroeconomic Dynamics provides extensive applications of important macroeconomic dynamic models to the international economy. It adopts the main contemporary macroeconomic framework, the representative agent model, and develops a series of models of increasing complexity. The author considers both small and large economies and analyzes them in both deterministic and stochastic contexts. The emphasis is very much on the development of the analytical models; a novel feature is the extensive use of continuous-time stochastic methods. While the author applies the models to a range of important policy issues, particularly issues of fiscal policy, the reader is invited to view the analyses as blueprints for other applications.




Macroeconomic Dimensions of Public Finance


Book Description

There is no magic formula for balancing fiscal policy and economic performance. As a scholar and policy advisor, Vito Tanzi has made a major contribution to identifying links between public finance and macro and microeconomic consequences. His findings bear relevance in both developing and industrialized economies. The essays in this volume and its companion, Fiscal Policy and Economic Reform, highlight many of these interconnected issues, for instance: * the interaction between budgetary policy and economic aggregates, such as employment, inflation and growth * the implication of economic linkages for designing fiscal policies * expenditure policies and alternative deficit financing strategies * the trade-offs between macro- and microeconomic objectives The list of contributors includes Max Corden, John Makin, Ronald McKinnon and Richard Musgrave.