NBER Publications by Alexander L. Wolman

In a plain-vanilla New Keynesian model with two-period staggered price-setting, discretionary monetary policy leads to multiple equilibria. Complementarity between the pricing decisions of forward-looking firms underlies the multiplicity, which is intrinsically dynamic in nature. At each point in time, the discretionary monetary authority optimally accommodates the level of predetermined prices when setting the money supply because it is concerned solely about real activity. Hence, if other firms set a high price in the current period, an individual firm will optimally choose a high price because it knows that the monetary authority next period will accommodate with a high money supply. Under commitment, the mechanism generating complementarity is absent: the monetary authority commits n...

Optimal monetary policy maximizes the welfare of a representative agent, given frictions in the economic environment. Constructing a model with two sets of frictions -- costly price adjustment by imperfectly competitive firms and costly exchange of wealth for goods -- we find optimal monetary policy is governed by two familiar principles. First, the average level of the nominal interest rate should be sufficiently low, as suggested by Milton Friedman, that there should be deflation on average. Yet, the Keynesian frictions imply that the optimal nominal interest rate is positive. Second, as various shocks occur to the real and monetary sectors, the price level should be largely stabilized, as suggested by Irving Fisher, albeit around a deflationary trend path. Since expected inflation is ro...

Inflation targeting is a monetary policy rule that has implications for both the average performance of an economy and its business cycle behavior. We use a modern, rational expectations model to study the twin effects of this policy rule. The model highlights forward- looking consumption and labor supply decisions by households and forward-looking investment and price-setting decisions by firms. In it, monetary policy has real effects because imperfectly competitive firms are constrained to adjust prices only infrequently and satisfy all demand at posted prices. In this 'sticky price' model, there are also effects of the average rate of inflation on the amount of time that individuals must devote to shopping activity and on the average markup of price over cost that firms can charge. ...