Carl Snyder was one of the most prominent US monetary economists of the 1920s and 1930s. His pioneering work on constructing the empirical counterparts of the terms in the equation of exchange led him to formulate a 4% monetary growth rule. Snyder is especially apposite because he was on the staff of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Why, despite his pioneering empirical work and his position as an insider, did Snyder fail to effectively challenge the dominant real bills views of the Federal Reserve (Fed)? A short answer is that he did not possess a convincing version of the quantity theory that attributed the Great Depression to a contraction in the money stock produced by the Fed, as opposed to the dominant real bills view attributing it to the collapse of speculative excess.

Milton Friedman and David Meiselman’s 1963 article, “The Relative Stability of Monetary Velocity and the Investment Multiplier in the United States, 1897–1958,” was one of the most influential studies to come out of the Keynesian-monetarist debates of the 1960s and 1970s. The gestation of the article, however, is shrouded with considerable inaccuracy and ambiguity. I use archival materials to provide a more accurate chronological ordering of the gestation of the article than has hitherto been available. I show that the gestation was subject to considerable delays. I provide reasons that explain why a long-promised follow-up paper was never completed and why a book sequel to Friedman’s 1956 Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money, planned as a co-edited work shortly after the appearance of the Friedman and Meiselman 1963 article, was not published until 1970 and was edited by Meiselman alone.

Aaron Director taught at the University of Chicago from 1930 to 1934 and from 1946 to 1965. Both periods corresponded to crucial stages in the development of Chicago monetary economics under the leaderships of Henry Simons and Milton Friedman, respectively. Any impact that Director may have had in the development of those stages and on the relationship between the views of Simons and Friedman has been frustrated by Director’s lack of publications. I provide evidence, much of it for the first time, showing the important role played by Director in the development of Chicago monetary economics, including his role as a transmitter of Simons’s ideas to Friedman.

There has long been a presumption that the price-level stabilization frameworks of Irving Fisher and Chicagoans Henry Simons and Lloyd Mints were essentially equivalent. I show that there were subtle, but important, differences in the rationales underlying the policies of Fisher and the Chicagoans. Fisher’s framework involved substantial discretion in the setting of the policy instruments; for the Chicagoans the objective of a policy rule was to tie the hands of the authorities in order to reduce discretion and, thus, monetary policy uncertainty. In contrast to Fisher, the Chicagoans provided assessments of the workings of alternative rules, assessed various criteria—including simplicity and reduction of political pressures—in the specification of rules, and concluded that rules would provide superior performance compared with discretion. Each of these characteristics provided a direct link to the rules-based framework of Milton Friedman. Like Friedman’s framework, Simons’s preferred rule targeted a policy instrument.

We provide a new way of deriving a number of dynamic unobserved factors from a set of variables. We show how standard principal components may be expressed in state space form and estimated using the Kalman filter. To illustrate our procedure, we perform two exercises. First, we use it to estimate a measure of the current account imbalances among northern and southern euro area countries that developed during the period leading up to the outbreak of the euro area crisis, before looking at adjustment in the post-crisis period. Second, we show how these dynamic factors can improve forecasting of the euro exchange rate.

Coefficient drivers are observable variables that feed into time-varying coefficients (TVCs) and explain at least part of their movement. To implement the TVC approach, the drivers are split into two subsets, one of which is correlated with the bias-free coefficient that we want to estimate and the other with the misspecification in the model. This split, however, can appear to be arbitrary. We provide a way of splitting the drivers that takes account of any nonlinearity that may be present in the data, with the aim of removing the arbitrary element in driver selection. We also provide an example of the practical use of our method by applying it to modeling the effect of ratings on sovereign-bond spreads.

Building on the time-varying-coefficient (TVC) model, we propose a generalization of the concept of cointegration, allowing for the possibility that a set of variables measured with error entails a nonlinear relationship with unknown functional form. Both the dependent and explanatory variables of this relationship may be nonstationary (not necessarily of unit-root type), but there exists a nonlinear combination of all these explanatory variables that completely explains all the variation in the dependent variable. The TVC model allows us to test for the presence of this generalized cointegration in the absence of knowledge of the true nonlinear functional form and the full set of explanatory variables. We present the basic stages of the technique and discuss in detail how the issues of nonstationarity and cointegration affect each stage of the TVC estimation procedure.

We examine whether the importance of lagged inflation in the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) may be a result of specification biases. NKPCs are estimated for four countries: France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Using time-varying coefficient (TVC) estimation, a procedure that can deal with possible specification biases, we find support for the NKPC model that excludes lagged inflation. Our results indicate a Phillips-curve relationship for the countries considered that does not contain an inertial element.

Under certain interpretations of its coefficients, a specified econometric model is an exact representation of the “true” model, defining the “objective” probability distribution. This note enumerates these interpretations. In the absence of the conditions implied by these interpretations, the econometric model is misspecified. The note shows that model misspecifications prevent the satisfaction of a necessary and sufficient condition for individual expectations to be rational in Muth's sense. Whereas restrictive forms of econometric models can give very inaccurate predictions, this note describes the conditions under which the predictions generated from time-varying coefficient models coincide with the predictions generated from the relevant economic theory.