Economics - Research Publications
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ItemShould We Worry about Government Debt? Thoughts on Australia's COVID-19 Response(Wiley, 2020-12-22)No. While the COVID-19 crisis has required a dramatic increase in debt-financed government spending, in the current conditions the benefits from this debt are unusually high and the costs unusually low. While conditions can change, the Australian Government can right now hedge against these risks by lengthening the maturity structure of government debt, even at the cost of a modest increase in its current servicing costs.
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ItemThe Case for Reform of the Reserve Bank of Australia Policy and Communication Strategy(Wiley, 2020-03-01)At any time, the public should be able to evaluate whether the Reserve Bank of Australia's (RBA) interest rate decisions are consistent with achieving statutory mandates. The RBA's current policy and communication strategy makes this difficult. The mandates, as interpreted by the RBA, fail to provide a clearly identifiable performance benchmark. And the supporting communication strategy falls short of a commitment to explain the economic basis of why and how interest rate decisions achieve mandated objectives. Examples of both concerns are given from various public documents. Basic reforms would improve the accountability and effectiveness of monetary policy.
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ItemThe Science of Monetary Policy: An Imperfect Knowledge Perspective(American Economic Association, 2018-03)This paper reevaluates the basic prescriptions of monetary policy design in the new Keynesian paradigm through the lens of imperfect knowledge. We show that while the basic logic of monetary policy design under rational expectations continues to obtain, perfect knowledge and learning can limit the set of policies available to central banks, rendering expectations management in general more difficult. Nonetheless, the desirability of some form of price-level targeting, inducing inertia in interest-rate policy, paramount under rational expectations, is robust to the assumption of imperfect knowledge.
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ItemSome implications of learning for price stability(Elsevier, 2018-07-01)Survey data on expectations of a range of macroeconomic variables exhibit low-frequency drift. In a New Keynesian model consistent with these empirical properties, optimal policy in general delivers a positive inflation rate in the long run. Two special cases deliver classic outcomes under rational expectations: as the degree of low-frequency variation in beliefs goes to zero, the long-run inflation rate coincides with the inflation bias under optimal discretion; for non-zero low-frequency drift in beliefs, as households become highly patient valuing utility in any period equally, the optimal long-run inflation rate coincides with optimal commitment – price stability is optimal. The optimal state-contingent response to cost-push disturbances similarly reflects properties of optimal discretion and optimal commitment, depending on the degree of low-frequency variation in beliefs. When beliefs exhibit substantial variation in response to short-run forecast errors, optimal policy is closer to commitment.
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ItemFiscal Foundations of Inflation: Imperfect Knowledge(American Economic Association, 2018-09)This paper proposes a theory of the fiscal foundations of inflation based on imperfect knowledge and learning. Because imperfect knowledge breaks Ricardian equivalence, the scale and composition of the public debt matter for inflation. High and moderate duration debt generates wealth effects on consumption demand that impairs the intertemporal substitution channel of monetary policy: aggressive monetary policy is required to anchor inflation expectations. Counterfactual experiments conducted in an estimated model reveal that the US economy would have been substantially more volatile over the Great Inflation and Great Moderation periods if US debt levels had been those observed in Italy or Japan.