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Is it desirable that central banks be more transparent in the communication of sensible information when agents have diverse private information? In practice, there exists some consensus about the benefits of acting in this way. However, other studies warn that increasing the precision of public information may raise the volatility of some aggregate variables - in particular, the price level - due to the disproportionate influence that it exerts on agents' decisions, and that this, in turn, will have negative effects on welfare. This paper studies the welfare effects of varying levels of transparency in a model of price-setting under monopolistic competition and imperfect common knowledge. Our results indicate that more precise public information never leads to a reduction of welfare in this framework. We find that the beneficial effects of decreased imperfect common knowledge due to a more precise common signal always compensates the potential rise in aggregate volatility. Moreover, we show that, in contrast to what has previously been assumed, the variability of the aggregate price level has no detrimental welfare effects in this model.
Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.
Economic growth, low inflation, and financial stability are among the most important goals of policy makers, and central banks such as the Federal Reserve are key institutions for achieving these goals. In Asset Prices and Monetary Policy, leading scholars and practitioners probe the interaction of central banks, asset markets, and the general economy to forge a new understanding of the challenges facing policy makers as they manage an increasingly complex economic system. The contributors examine how central bankers determine their policy prescriptions with reference to the fluctuating housing market, the balance of debt and credit, changing beliefs of investors, the level of commodity prices, and other factors. At a time when the public has never been more involved in stocks, retirement funds, and real estate investment, this insightful book will be useful to all those concerned with the current state of the economy.
An authoritative graduate textbook on information choice, an exciting frontier of research in economics and finance Most theories in economics and finance predict what people will do, given what they know about the world around them. But what do people know about their environments? The study of information choice seeks to answer this question, explaining why economic players know what they know—and how the information they have affects collective outcomes. Instead of assuming what people do or don't know, information choice asks what people would choose to know. Then it predicts what, given that information, they would choose to do. In this textbook, Laura Veldkamp introduces graduate students in economics and finance to this important new research. The book illustrates how information choice is used to answer questions in monetary economics, portfolio choice theory, business cycle theory, international finance, asset pricing, and other areas. It shows how to build and test applied theory models with information frictions. And it covers recent work on topics such as rational inattention, information markets, and strategic games with heterogeneous information. Illustrates how information choice is used to answer questions in monetary economics, portfolio choice theory, business cycle theory, international finance, asset pricing, and other areas Teaches how to build and test applied theory models with information frictions Covers recent research on topics such as rational inattention, information markets, and strategic games with heterogeneous information
How have monetary policies matured during the last decade? The recent downturn in economies worldwide have put monetary policies in a new spotlight. In addition to their investigations of new tools, models, and assumptions, they look carefully at recent evidence on subjects as varied as price-setting, inflation persistence, the private sector's formation of inflation expectations, and the monetary policy transmission mechanism. They also reexamine standard presumptions about the rationality of asset markets and other fundamentals. Stopping short of advocating conclusions about the ideal conduct of policy, the authors focus instead on analytical methods and the changing interactions among the ingredients and properties that inform monetary models. The influences between economic performance and monetary policy regimes can be both grand and muted, and this volume clarifies the present state of this continually evolving relationship. Presents extensive coverage of monetary policy theories with an eye toward questions raised by the recent financial crisis Explores the policies and practices used in formulating and transmitting monetary policies Questions fiscal-monetary connnections and encourages new thinking about the business cycle itself Observes changes in the formulation of monetary policies over the last 25 years
How have monetary policies matured during the last decade? The recent downturn in economies worldwide have put monetary policies in a new spotlight. In addition to their investigations of new tools, models, and assumptions, they look carefully atrecent evidence on subjects as varied as price-setting, inflation persistence, the private sector's formation of inflation expectations, and the monetary policy transmission mechanism. They also reexamine standard presumptions about the rationality of asset markets and other fundamentals. Stopping short of advocating conclusions about the ideal conduct of policy, the authors focus instead on analytical methods and the changing interactions among the ingredients and properties that inform monetary models. The influences between economic performance and monetary policy regimes can be both grand and muted, and this volume clarifies the present state of this continually evolving relationship. Presents extensive coverage of monetary policy theories with an eye toward questions raised by the recent financial crisis Explores the policies and practices used in formulating and transmitting monetary policiesQuestions fiscal-monetary connections and encourages new thinking about the business cycle itself Observes changes in the formulation of monetary policies over the last 25 years.
Based on lectures given as part of The Stone Lectures in Economics, this book discusses the problem of formulating monetary policy in practice, under the uncertain circumstances which characterize the real world. The first lecture highlights the limitations of decision rules suggested by the academic literature and recommends an approach involving, first, a firm reliance on the few fundamental and robust results of monetary economics and, secondly, a pragmatic attitude to policy implementation, taking into consideration lessons from central banking experience. The second lecture revisits Milton Friedman's questions about the effects of active stabilization policies on business cycle fluctuations. It explores the implications of a simple model where the policy maker has imperfect knowledge about potential output and the private sector forms expectations according to adaptive learning. This lecture shows that imperfect knowledge limits the scope for active stabilization policy and strengthens the case for conservatism.
Posing a major challenge to economic orthodoxy, Imperfect Knowledge Economics asserts that exact models of purposeful human behavior are beyond the reach of economic analysis. Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg argue that the longstanding empirical failures of conventional economic models stem from their futile efforts to make exact predictions about the consequences of rational, self-interested behavior. Such predictions, based on mechanistic models of human behavior, disregard the importance of individual creativity and unforeseeable sociopolitical change. Scientific though these explanations may appear, they usually fail to predict how markets behave. And, the authors contend, recent behavioral models of the market are no less mechanistic than their conventional counterparts: they aim to generate exact predictions of "irrational" human behavior. Frydman and Goldberg offer a long-overdue response to the shortcomings of conventional economic models. Drawing attention to the inherent limits of economists' knowledge, they introduce a new approach to economic analysis: Imperfect Knowledge Economics (IKE). IKE rejects exact quantitative predictions of individual decisions and market outcomes in favor of mathematical models that generate only qualitative predictions of economic change. Using the foreign exchange market as a testing ground for IKE, this book sheds new light on exchange-rate and risk-premium movements, which have confounded conventional models for decades. Offering a fresh way to think about markets and representing a potential turning point in economics, Imperfect Knowledge Economics will be essential reading for economists, policymakers, and professional investors.
Handbook of Macroeconomics Volumes 2A and 2B surveys major advances in macroeconomic scholarship since the publication of Volume 1 (1999), carefully distinguishing between empirical, theoretical, methodological, and policy issues, including fiscal, monetary, and regulatory policies to deal with crises, unemployment, and economic growth. As this volume shows, macroeconomics has undergone a profound change since the publication of the last volume, due in no small part to the questions thrust into the spotlight by the worldwide financial crisis of 2008. With contributions from the world's leading macroeconomists, its reevaluation of macroeconomic scholarship and assessment of its future constitute an investment worth making. - Serves a double role as a textbook for macroeconomics courses and as a gateway for students to the latest research - Acts as a one-of-a-kind resource as no major collections of macroeconomic essays have been published in the last decade - Builds upon Volume 1 by using its section headings to illustrate just how far macroeconomic thought has evolved
"This paper studies the consequences of a lack of common knowledge in the transmission of monetary policy by integrating the Woodford (2003a) imperfect common knowledge model with Taylor-Calvo staggered price-setting models. The average price set by monopolistically competitive firms who can only observe the state of the economy through noisy private signals depends on their higher-order expectations about not only the current state but also about the states in the future periods in which prices are to be fixed. This integrated model provides a plausible explanation for the observed effects of monetary policy: it shows analytically how price adjustments are delayed and how the response of output to monetary disturbances is amplified. I also consider a more general information structure in which a noisy public signal, in addition to the private signals, is introduced."--Author's abstract.