Traditionally, in the Federal Reserve's Open Market statements, the planned Federal Funds rate is set to be contained within well defined bands and not a given single value, so that the funds rate is able to vary freely within that range without interference.This paper provides an explanation of...

The conclusions of a logically consistent economic theory which strictly adheres to Aristotle's axioms of logic are factually true if its sufficient conditions are all factually true. Alternatively, if a conclusion of such a theory is false, then at least one of its assumptions is false....

This paper, written for a Federal Reserve Staff Review of Monetary Control Procedures, explores the short-run volatility consequences of money stock targeting procedures under current (1981) alternative operating procedures. Conclusions include: the odds are at least two to one that a portion of...

Among the many troublesome econometric relationships, the demand for money has proved especially recalcitrant, as evidenced by a long history of tinkering with basic specifications, always in response to some recent perceived forecast failure. The shortcomings of this approach and an alternative...

The optimal control literature traditionally analyzes linear-quadratic Gaussian (LQG) formulations of macroeconomic policy design where policy planers seek to minimize the distance between a direct target vector y and a vector of aspiration levels y*, using a suitably dimensioned matrix M as a...

This paper is a discussion and critique of "Recent Developments in Price Dynamics" by William D. Nordhaus and a distillation of my previous work on the subject. Its main contribution is the proposition that, contrary to previous literature, if prices move dynamically due to optimization, then...

In the late 1960s and into the 1970s, the United States experienced a burst of inflation the origins of which seemed hard to uncover. This paper advances the idea that the Fed simply got the model wrong. We assume that the true model of the economy is a variant of the standard New Keynesian...

In the 2-1/2 years between March, 1996 and September, 1998 the civilian unemployment rate in the United States dropped a full percentage point, the 12-month CPI inflation rate fell nearly 1-1/2 percentage points, a major crisis developed in emerging economies, and commodity prices collapsed....

This paper explores Knightian model uncertainty about dynamic misspecification as a possible explanation of the considerable difference between estimated interest rate rules and optimal feedback descriptions of monetary policy. In the literature on robust control, Knightian uncertainty about a...