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A NOTE ON NOMINAL GDP TARGETING AND MACROECONOMIC (IN)STABILITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2018

Shu-Hua Chen
Shu-Hua Chen*
Affiliation:
National Taipei University
*
Address correspondence to: Shu-Hua Chen, Department of Economics, National Taipei University, 151 University Road, San Shia District, New Taipei City 23741, Taiwan; e-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

Benhabib and Farmer show that in a laissez-faire one-sector real business cycle model under aggregate increasing returns, under sufficiently high degrees of productive externality, the demand-side effect in the labor market triggered by agents' expectations about the economy's future outweighs the supply-side effect, making agents' expectations become self-fulfilling. This paper analytically demonstrates that the conduct of monetary policy under nominal gross domestic product (GDP) targeting reinforces the supply-side effect in the labor market, thereby making belief-driven aggregate fluctuations more difficult to occur. This reinforcement effect on labor supply is absent under nominal consumption targeting and inflation targeting. Hence, under these two monetary regimes, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the economy to display equilibrium indeterminacy and sunspot fluctuations are identical to those in Benhabib and Farmer's laissez-faire economy. The results are robust to an endogenous growth extension of the model, implying that targeting the nominal GDP growth rate is more desirable than targeting the nominal consumption growth rate or the inflation rate in terms of macroeconomic stability.

Keywords

Nominal GDP TargetingInflation TargetingEquilibrium (In)determinacyBusiness Cycles
Type
Notes
Information
Macroeconomic Dynamics , Volume 23 , Issue 8 , December 2019 , pp. 3483 - 3508
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

The author would like to thank William A. Barnett (Editor) and two anonymous referees for very helpful comments and suggestions which substantially improved the paper.

References

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