Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

About: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis is a other organization based out in St Louis, Missouri, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Monetary policy & Inflation. The organization has 203 authors who have published 1650 publications receiving 46084 citations.

Monetary Policy, Determinacy, and Learnability in the Open Economy

Abstract: We study how determinacy and learnability of global rational expectations equilibrium may be affected by monetary policy in a simple, two country, new Keynesian framework. The two blocks may be viewed as the U.S. and Europe, or as regions within the euro zone. We seek to understand how monetary policy choices may interact across borders to help or hinder the creation of a unique rational expectations equilibrium worldwide which can be learned by market participants. We study cases in which optimal policies are being pursued country by country as well as some forms of cooperation. We find that open economy considerations may alter conditions for determinacy and learnability relative to closed economy analyses, and that new concerns can arise in the analysis of classic topics such as the desirability of exchange rate targeting and monetary policy cooperation.

Optimal Stabilization Policy with Flexible Prices

Abstract: We construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to study optimal monetary stabilization policy. Prices are fully flexible and money is essential for trade. Our main result is that if the central bank pursues a long-run price path, thereby controlling inflation expectations, it can improve welfare by stabilizing short-run aggregate shocks. The optimal policy involves smoothing nominal interest rates which effectively smoothes consumption across states. Failure to follow a long-run price path makes any stabilization attempt ineffective.

The Exchange Rate and Inflation in the UK

Abstract: The United Kingdom is a highly open economy, and has a monetary policy strategy of targeting inflation in consumer prices. In this paper, we look at the evidence from the UK on inflation behaviour, and examine the propositions from several theoretical models about inflation dynamics in an open economy, focusing in particular on the hypothesized connections between the exchange rate and consumer price inflation. Theoretical open-economy macroeconomic models ‘cover the waterfront’ on this issue, ranging from ‘exchange rate disconnect’ to a rigid link between nominal exchange rate changes and inflation. We estimate on UK data the open-economy Phillips curves implied by the alternative explanations. We argue that, of the alternatives considered, only a model where imports are modelled as an intermediate good, as in McCallum and Nelson (1999), provides a reasonable match with the data. Unlike the standard model, in which imports are treated as a final consumer good, the intermediate-goods specification provides support for a policy of CPI inflation targeting.

Endogenous Money Supply and the Business Cycle

Abstract: This paper documents changes in the cyclical behavior of nominal data series that appear after 1979:IIIQ, when the Federal Reserve implemented a policy to end the acceleration of inflation. Such changes were not apparent in real variables. A business cycle model with impulses to technology and a role for money is used to show how alternative money supply rules ·are expected to affect observed business cycle facts. In this model, changes in the money supply rules have almost no effect on the cyclical behavior of real variables, yet have a significant impact on the cyclical nature of nominal variables. Computational experiments with alternative policy rules suggest that the change in monetary policy in 1979 may account for the sort of instability observed in the U.S. data.