Federal Reserve System

About: Federal Reserve System is a other organization based out in Washington D.C., District of Columbia, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Monetary policy & Inflation. The organization has 2373 authors who have published 10301 publications receiving 511979 citations.

Optimal Monetary Policy with Staggered Wage and Price Contracts

Abstract: We formulate an optimizing-agent model in which both labor and product markets exhibit monopolistic competition and staggered nominal contracts. The unconditional expectation of average household utility can be expressed in terms of the unconditional variances of the output gap, price inflation, and wage inflation. Monetary policy cannot replicate the Pareto-optimal equilibrium that would occur under completely flexible wages and prices; that is, the model exhibits a tradeoff between stabilizing the output gap, price inflation, and wage inflation. The Pareto optimum is attainable only if either wages or prices are completely flexible. For reasonable calibrations of the model, we characterize the optimal policy rule. Furthermore, strict price inflation targeting is clearly suboptimal, whereas rules that also respond to either the output gap or wage inflation are nearly optimal.

Stochastic Trends and Economic Fluctuations

Abstract: Are business cycles mainly the result of permanent shocks to productivity? This paper uses a long-run restriction implied by a large class of real-business-cycle models -identifying permanent productivity shocks as shocks to the common stochastic trend in output, consumption, and investment -to provide new evidence on this question. Econometric tests indicate that this common-stochastic-trend / cointegration implication is consistent with postwar U.S. data. However, in systems with nominal variables, the estimates of this common stochastic trend indicate that permanent productivity shocks typically explain less than half of the business-cycle variability in output, consumption, and investment. (JEL E32, C32) A central, surprising, and controversial result of some current research on real business cycles is the claim that a common stochastic trend-the cumulative effect of permanent shocks to productivity-underlies the bulk of economic fluctuations. If confirmed, this finding would imply that many other forces have been relatively unimportant over historical business cycles, including the monetary and fiscal policy shocks stressed in traditional macroeconomic analysis. This paper shows that the hypothesis of a common stochastic productivity trend has a set of econometric implications that allows us to test for its presence, measure its importance, and extract estimates of its realized value. Applying these procedures to consumption, investment, and output for the postwar United States, we find results that both support and contradict this claim in the real-businesscycle literature. The U.S. data are consistent with the presence of a common

Monetary Policy Rules Based on Real-Time Data

Abstract: In recent years, simple policy rules have received attention as a means to a more transparent and effective monetary policy. Often, however, the analysis is based on unrealistic assumptions about the timeliness of data availability. This permits rule specifications that are not operational and ignore difficulties associated with data revisions. This paper examines the magnitude of these informational problems using Taylor's rule as an example. I demonstrate that the real-time policy recommendations differ considerably from those obtained with the ex post revised data and are revised substantially even a year after the relevant quarter. Further, I show that estimated policy reaction functions obtained using the ex post revised data can yield misleading descriptions of historical policy. Using Federal Reserve staff forecasts I show that in the 1987-1992 period simple forward-looking specifications describe policy better than comparable Taylor-type specifications, a fact that is largely obscured when the analysis is based on the ex post revised data.

Capital-skill complementarity and inequality: A macroeconomic analysis

Abstract: The supply and price of skilled labor relative to unskilled labor have changed dramatically over the postwar period. The relative quantity of skilled labor has increased substantially, and the skill premium, which is the wage of skilled labor relative to that of unskilled labor, has grown significantly since 1980. Many studies have found that accounting for the increase in the skill premium on the basis of observable variables is difficult and have concluded implicitly that latent skill-biased technological change must be the main factor responsible. This paper examines that view systematically. We develop a framework that provides a simple, explicit economic mechanism for understanding skill-biased technological change in terms of observable variables, and we use the framework to evaluate the fraction of variation in the skill premium that can be accounted for by changes in observed factor quantities. We find that with capital-skill complementarity, changes in observed inputs alone can account for most of the variations in the skill premium over the last 30 years.