Recent theorizing with business cycle models which incorporate features of the Friedman-Phelps natural rate model along with rational expectations lead to the following policy conclusions. Anticipated changes in aggregate demand policy will have already been taken into account in economic agents behavior and will thus evoke no further output or employment response. Therefore, deterministic feedback policy rules will have no impact on output fluctuations in the economy. These policy implications of what Modigliani has dubbed the Macro Rational Expectations (MRE) hypothesis are of such importance that a wide range of empirical research is needed for its verification or refutation. Recent empirical work has tested the "neutrality" implication of the MRE hypothesis that anticipated monetary policy does not affect output or unemployment. Although this empirical work has frequently been favorable to the MRE hypothesis, it suffers from several deficiencies that create suspicion about the robustness of the results. This paper is an attempt to conduct an econometric investigation of the implications of the MRE hypothesis which does not suffer from these deficiencies. The results here strongly reject the neutrality implications of the MRE hypothesis: unanticipated movements in monetary policy are not found to have a larger impact on output and unemployment than anticipated movements. This evidence casts doubt on previous evidence that is cited as supporting the view that only unanticipated monetary policy is relevant to the business cycle.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
0506.
Length: Date of creation: Aug 1982 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:0506
Note: EFG Contact details of provider: Postal: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. Phone: 617-868-3900 Email: Web page: http://www.nber.org More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: ().
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.