Old Time Papers

• Business Cycle Modeling without Pretending to Have Too Much A Priori Economic Theory

  with Christopher Sims
  1977
  This paper is an out of print old timer. Several people asked me to put it on my webpage.

• Is Keynesian Economics a Dead End?

  October 1977
  This paper is an old timer. It served as notes for my November 1977 talk to the Minnesota economics association. At those meetings, I saw my old undergraduate teacher Hyman Minsky for the first time since undergraduate days at Cal Berkeley.

• Business Cycle Analysis with Unobservable Index Models and the Methods of the NBER

  with Robert Litterman and Danny Quah
  June, 1984
  This is an unpublished paper about dynamic unobservable index models like the ones in the previous paper with Chris Sims.

• Using Unobservable Index Models to Estimate Unobservables and Forecast Observables

  with Robert Litterman and Danny Quah
  April, 1984
  This is another unpublished paper about dynamic unobservable index models..

• Informationally Decentralized Learning Algorithms for Finite Player, Finite Action Games of Incomplete Information

  with William Brock, Ramon Marimon, and John Rust
  April 1988

• Some of Milton Friedman’s Scientific Contributions to Macroeconomics

  An assessment of the enduring influences of Milton Friedman’s work in macroeconomics.

• The Timing of Tax Collections and the Structure of  "Irrelevance'' Theorems in a Cash-in-Advance Model: Vintage Article

  with Bruce Smith
  June 2009, Originally 1998
  A standard timing protocol allows in a cash-in-advance model allows the government to elude the inflation tax. That matters. Altering the timing of tax collections to make the government hold cash overnight disables some classical propositions but enables others. The altered timing protocol loses a Ricardian proposition and also the proposition that open market operations, accompanied by tax adjustments needed to finance the change in interest on bonds due the public, are equivalent with pure units changes. The altered timing enables a Modigliani-Miller equivalence proposition that does not otherwise prevail.

• Alternative Monetary Policies in a Turnpike Economy: Vintage Article

  with Rodolfo Manuelli
  June 2009
  This paper modifies a Townsend turnpike model by letting agents stay at a location long enough to trade some consumption loans, but not long enough to support a Pareto optimal allocation. Monetary equilibria exist that are non-optimal in the absence of a scheme to pay interest on currency at a particular rate. Paying interest on currency at the optimal rate delivers a Pareto optimal allocation, but a different one than the allocation for an associated nonmonetary centralized economy. The price level remains determinate under an optimal policy. We study the response of the model to ``helicopter drops of currency, steady increases in the money supply, and restrictions on private intermediation.
  

• Discounted Linear Exponential Quadratic Gaussian Control

  with Lars Peter Hansen
  May 1995

• Policy Rules for Open Economies

  January 1998
  Discussion of Laurence Ball

• Wanting Robustness in Macroeconomics

  with Lars Peter Hansen
  June 10, 2000
  This paper is a `nontechnical' (according to Hansen) survey of an approach to building a preference for robust decision rules into macroeconomics.

• The Convergence of Autoregressions to Rational Expectations Equilibria

  with Albert Marcet
  from the early 1990s
  An exploration of convergence of least squares learning to rational expectations equilibrium

• Speed of Convergence of Recursive Least Squares: Learning with Autoregressive Moving-Average Perceptions

  with Albert Marcet
  From the early 1990s
  We ``use the computer'' to estimate rates of convergence to REE in some natural settings in which they are slower that square root of T.