Monetary Policy, Business Fluctuations, and Economic Growth

这个项目是对通货膨胀、失业和经济增长等宏观经济总量行为的大量研究的一部分。该项目由三部分组成。第一部分继续对中央银行以名义利率为目标的货币政策理论进行发展和实证检验。第二次世界大战后美国的初步实证结果显示，利率目标似乎特别适用，理论假设与货币、价格和利率的行为吻合得很好。该项目扩展了这一理论，并在一战前美国的数据上测试了这一模型，当时由于美国实行金本位制，利率目标制并不适用。它还将该模型应用于从18世纪初一直到现在的英国数据的漫长历史。第二部分论述了近年来明显存在的失业问题。采用时间序列方法来评估不同国家在不同时期的这种持续程度。这些衡量持久性的指标与一些变量有关，一个经济模型认为，这些变量对经济的调整速度应该很重要。初步结果表明，工会组织、劳资谈判形式和政府规模都有一定的影响。进一步的研究集中在实证方面，特别是在劳动力市场中限制解雇和雇用的作用。第三部分是在前一篇文章的基础上发展的内生经济增长模型的扩展。该项目将人口增长分析与最新的技术进步理论相结合。这些模型显示了长期增长率如何取决于诸如政府政策、自然资源和时间偏好率等变量。这些理论被用来解释各国经济增长表现的一些差异。从科学和政策的角度来看，这一雄心勃勃的议程都很重要。在科学上，该项目为货币政策、失业和经济增长提供了新的理论。经济增长理论尤其令人兴奋，因为它综合了劳动经济学、技术变革和宏观经济学的研究成果。这一新理论不仅将为研究整体经济表现提供一种更有力、更通用的方法，而且还将不同的经济研究领域结合在一起，丰富了它们。该项目还解决了及时的政策问题，如利率目标的适当性和不同失业政策的有效性。

This project is part of a large body of research into the behavior of such macroeconomic aggregates as inflation, unemployment and economic growth. The project consists of three parts. The first part continues the development and empirical testing of a theory of monetary policy in which the central bank targets nominal interest rates. Preliminary empirical results for the post-World War II period for the U.S., where interest- rate targeting seems especially to apply, show the theoretical hypotheses match up well with the behavior of money, prices, and interest rates. The project extends the theory and tests the model on pre-World War I data for the U.S., a period when interest-rate targeting did not apply because the U.S. was on the gold standard. It also applies the model to a long history of British data stretching from the early 1700s through the present. The second part deals with the persistence of unemployment, which has been pronounced in recent years. A time-series approach is used to assess the extent of this persistence in various countries over various time periods. These measures of persistence are related to variables that an economic model says should matter for the economy's speed of adjustment. Preliminary results suggest some effects from unionization, the form of labor bargaining, and the size of government. Further research focuses on the empirical side, especially on the role of restrictions on firing and hiring in the labor market. The third part concerns extensions of models of endogenous economic growth developed under the previous grant. The project merges analyses of population growth with recent theory of technological progress. These models show how long-term growth rates depend on such variables as government policies, natural resources and rates of time preferences. These theories are utilized to explain some differences in growth performances across countries. This ambitious agenda is important from both a scientific and policy perspective. Scientifically, the project contributes new theories of monetary policy, unemployment and economic growth. The theory of economic growth is especially exciting because it synthesizes work in labor economics, technological change and macroeconomics. This new theory not only will provide a more powerful and general way of studying overall economic performance, but it enriches different fields of economic research by drawing them together. The project also addresses timely policy issues such as the appropriateness of interest-rate targeting and the effectiveness of different unemployment policies.