IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/jhu/papers/589.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Ben Bernanke and the Zero Bound

Author

Listed:
  • Laurence Ball

Abstract

From 2000 to 2003, when Ben Bernanke was a professor and then a Fed Governor, he wrote extensively about monetary policy at the zero bound on interest rates. He advocated aggressive stimulus policies, such as a money-financed tax cut and an inflation target of 3-4%. Yet, since U.S. interest rates hit zero in 2008, the Fed under Chairman Bernanke has taken more cautious actions. This paper asks when and why Bernanke changed his mind about zero-bound policy. The answer, at one level, is that he was influenced by analysis from the Fed staff that was presented at the FOMC meeting of June 2003. This answer raises another question: why did the staff’s views influence Bernanke so strongly? I seek answers to this question in the social psychology literature on group decision-making.

Suggested Citation

  • Laurence Ball, 2012. "Ben Bernanke and the Zero Bound," Economics Working Paper Archive 589, The Johns Hopkins University,Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:jhu:papers:589
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://econ.jhu.edu/wp-content/uploads/pdf/papers/wp589_ball.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. David C. Wyld, 2010. "ASecond Life for organizations?: managing in the new, virtual world," Management Research Review, Emerald Group Publishing, vol. 33(6), pages 529-562, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Bank of Japan at the Policy Frontier
      by Steve Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz in Money, Banking and Financial Markets on 2016-10-31 17:38:58

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sylvester Eijffinger & Ronald Mahieu & Louis Raes, 2016. "Monetary Policy Committees, Voting Behavior and Ideal Points," BAFFI CAREFIN Working Papers 1628, BAFFI CAREFIN, Centre for Applied Research on International Markets Banking Finance and Regulation, Universita' Bocconi, Milano, Italy.
    2. Kazuo Ueda, 2012. "Deleveraging and Monetary Policy: Japan since the 1990s and the United States since 2007," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 26(3), pages 177-202, Summer.
    3. Salter, Alexander W. & Smith, Daniel J., 2019. "Political economists or political economists? The role of political environments in the formation of fed policy under burns, Greenspan, and Bernanke," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 71(C), pages 1-13.
    4. N. Cordemans & S. Ide, 2012. "Monetary policy in the United States and the euro area during the crisis," Economic Review, National Bank of Belgium, issue i, pages 39-63, June.
    5. El-Shagi, Makram & Jung, Alexander, 2015. "Does the Greenspan era provide evidence on leadership in the FOMC?," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 173-190.
    6. Carlos Madeira & Joao Madeira, 2015. "Dissent in FOMC Meeting and the Announcement Drift," Working Papers Central Bank of Chile 749, Central Bank of Chile.
    7. Peter J. Boettke & Alexander W. Salter & Daniel J. Smith, 2018. "Money as meta-rule: Buchanan’s constitutional economics as a foundation for monetary stability," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 176(3), pages 529-555, September.
    8. Mikael Apel & Carl Andreas Claussen & Petra Lennartsdotter & Øistein Røisland, 2015. "Monetary Policy Committees: Comparing Theory and "Inside" Information from MPC Members," International Journal of Central Banking, International Journal of Central Banking, vol. 11(4), pages 47-89, December.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy
    • E58 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Central Banks and Their Policies
    • E65 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Studies of Particular Policy Episodes

    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:jhu:papers:589. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (None) The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask None to update the entry or send us the correct email address. General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/dejhuus.html .

    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 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.

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.