John H. Cochrane

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Stepping on a Rake: the Fiscal Theory of Monetary Policy

European Economic Review 101, 354-375. The fiscal theory of the price level can describe monetary policy: interest rate targets, quantitative easing, and forward guidance. With long term debt, a higher interest rate can produce temporarily lower inflation. The paper starts with a completely frictionless environment, and then replicates Chris Sims's "stepping on a rake" paper, which has the latter result along with elaborations that smooth out the impulse-response functions. I boil Sims down to the central ingredient,long term debt. The replication is useful if you want to know how Sims derived his model or solved it; also useful as a guide to solving continuous-time sticky-price models with jumps. matlab program archive

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