IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/2616.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Optimal Monetary Policy with Endogenous Contracts: Should we Return to a Commodity Standard?

Author

Listed:
  • Minford, Patrick
  • Nowell, Eric

Abstract

A representative agent who is employed chooses an optimal degree of wage indexation (to prices and the auction wage) in response to the monetary regime. Should that regime target the growth rate or the level of the money supply, or of prices (as in a commodity standard)? We find that, contrary to the usual finding from macroeconomic models with fixed wage contract structures, there are gains in welfare for the average household, with both real wages and employment being stabilized. The reason is that when the monetary regime shifts to targeting levels, indexation falls markedly; this flattens the aggregate supply curve and steepens the aggregate demand curve, providing a high degree of ?automatic? stabilization. The choice between targeting money or prices creates a trade-off between employment and real wage stability-implying a distributional conflict between insiders and outsiders in the labour market.

Suggested Citation

  • Minford, Patrick & Nowell, Eric, 2000. "Optimal Monetary Policy with Endogenous Contracts: Should we Return to a Commodity Standard?," CEPR Discussion Papers 2616, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:2616
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP2616
    Download Restriction: CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. McCallum, Bennett T. & Nelson, Edward, 1999. "Nominal income targeting in an open-economy optimizing model," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(3), pages 553-578, June.
    2. Minford, Patrick & Nowell, Eric & Webb, Bruce, 1999. "Nominal Contracts and Monetary Targets," CEPR Discussion Papers 2215, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Minford, Patrick & Srinivasan, Naveen & Perugini, Francesco, 2001. "The Observational Equivalence of Taylor Rule and Taylor-Type Rules," CEPR Discussion Papers 2959, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    2. Patrick Minford & Prakriti Sofat, 2004. "An Open Economy Real Business Cycle Model for the UK," Money Macro and Finance (MMF) Research Group Conference 2004 23, Money Macro and Finance Research Group.
    3. Min Lu, 2012. "Current account dynamics and optimal monetary policy in a two-country economy," International Journal of Monetary Economics and Finance, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 5(3), pages 299-324.
    4. Adolfson, Malin, 2001. "Monetary Policy with Incomplete Exchange Rate Pass-Through," SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance 476, Stockholm School of Economics.
    5. Eric Parrado & Andrés Velasco, 2002. "Alternative Monetary Rules in the Open Economy: A Welfare-Based Approach," Central Banking, Analysis, and Economic Policies Book Series, in: Norman Loayza & Raimundo Soto & Norman Loayza (Series Editor) & Klaus Schmidt-Hebbel (Series Editor) (ed.),Inflation Targeting: Desing, Performance, Challenges, edition 1, volume 5, chapter 7, pages 295-348, Central Bank of Chile.
    6. Kollmann, Robert, 2003. "Monetary Policy Rules in an Interdependent World," CEPR Discussion Papers 4012, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    7. Christopher Erceg & Christopher Gust & David López-Salido, 2007. "The Transmission of Domestic Shocks in Open Economies," NBER Chapters, in: International Dimensions of Monetary Policy, pages 89-148, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Batini, Nicoletta & Harrison, Richard & Millard, Stephen P., 2003. "Monetary policy rules for an open economy," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 27(11-12), pages 2059-2094, September.
    9. Antonella Trigari, 2006. "The Role of Search Frictions and Bargaining for Inflation Dynamics," Working Papers 304, IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University.
    10. Wollmershauser, Timo, 2006. "Should central banks react to exchange rate movements? An analysis of the robustness of simple policy rules under exchange rate uncertainty," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 28(3), pages 493-519, September.
    11. Christopher J. Erceg & Luca Guerrieri & Christopher Gust, 2006. "SIGMA: A New Open Economy Model for Policy Analysis," International Journal of Central Banking, International Journal of Central Banking, vol. 2(1), March.
    12. Pär Österholm, 2005. "The Taylor Rule: A Spurious Regression?," Bulletin of Economic Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 57(3), pages 217-247, July.
    13. Svensson, Lars E. O., 1999. "Inflation targeting as a monetary policy rule," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(3), pages 607-654, June.
    14. Laxton, Douglas & Pesenti, Paolo, 2003. "Monetary rules for small, open, emerging economies," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(5), pages 1109-1146, July.
    15. Benchimol, Jonathan & Bounader, Lahcen, 2023. "Optimal monetary policy under bounded rationality," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 67(C).
    16. Lars E. O. Svensson, 2000. "The First Year of the Eurosystem: Inflation Targeting or Not?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(2), pages 95-99, May.
    17. Pierdzioch, Christian, 2004. "Capital mobility and the effectiveness of fiscal policy in open economies," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 26(3), pages 465-479, September.
    18. Mehra, Yash P., 2002. "Level and growth policy rules and actual Fed policy since 1979," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 54(6), pages 575-594.
    19. Glenn D. Rudebusch, 2002. "Assessing Nominal Income Rules for Monetary Policy with Model and Data Uncertainty," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 112(479), pages 402-432, April.
    20. Jonathan Benchimol & André Fourçans, 2016. "Nominal income versus Taylor-type rules in practice," Working Papers hal-01357870, HAL.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Monetary rules; Price level targeting; Interest rate setting; Inflation targeting;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E0 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General
    • E50 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:2616. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cepr.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.