New Keynesian economics
New Keynesian economics is a school of macroeconomics that strives to provide microeconomic foundations for Keynesian economics. It developed partly as a response to criticisms of Keynesian macroeconomics by adherents of new classical macroeconomics.
Not to be confused with Neo-Keynesian economics.
Two main assumptions define the New Keynesian approach to macroeconomics. Like the New Classical approach, New Keynesian macroeconomic analysis usually assumes that households and firms have rational expectations. However, the two schools differ in that New Keynesian analysis usually assumes a variety of market failures. In particular, New Keynesians assume that there is imperfect competition[1] in price and wage setting to help explain why prices and wages can become "sticky", which means they do not adjust instantaneously to changes in economic conditions.
Wage and price stickiness, and the other present descriptions of market failures in New Keynesian models, imply that the economy may fail to attain full employment. Therefore, New Keynesians argue that macroeconomic stabilization by the government (using fiscal policy) and the central bank (using monetary policy) can lead to a more efficient macroeconomic outcome than a laissez faire policy would.
New Keynesianism became part of the new neoclassical synthesis that incorporated parts of both it and new classical macroeconomics, and forms the theoretical basis of mainstream macroeconomics today.[2][3][4][5]
Development of New Keynesian economics[edit]
1970s[edit]
The first wave of New Keynesian economics developed in the late 1970s. The first model of Sticky information was developed by Stanley Fischer in his 1977 article, Long-Term Contracts, Rational Expectations, and the Optimal Money Supply Rule.[6] He adopted a "staggered" or "overlapping" contract model. Suppose that there are two unions in the economy, who take turns to choose wages. When it is a union's turn, it chooses the wages it will set for the next two periods. This contrasts with John B. Taylor's model where the nominal wage is constant over the contract life, as was subsequently developed in his two articles: one in 1979, "Staggered wage setting in a macro model",[7] and one in 1980, "Aggregate Dynamics and Staggered Contracts".[8] Both Taylor and Fischer contracts share the feature that only the unions setting the wage in the current period are using the latest information: wages in half of the economy still reflect old information. The Taylor model had sticky nominal wages in addition to the sticky information: nominal wages had to be constant over the length of the contract (two periods). These early new Keynesian theories were based on the basic idea that, given fixed nominal wages, a monetary authority (central bank) can control the employment rate. Since wages are fixed at a nominal rate, the monetary authority can control the real wage (wage values adjusted for inflation) by changing the money supply and thus affect the employment rate.[9]
Policy implications[edit]
New Keynesian economists agree with New Classical economists that in the long run, the classical dichotomy holds: changes in the money supply are neutral. However, because prices are sticky in the New Keynesian model, an increase in the money supply (or equivalently, a decrease in the interest rate) does increase output and lower unemployment in the short run. Furthermore, some New Keynesian models confirm the non-neutrality of money under several conditions.[69][70]
Nonetheless, New Keynesian economists do not advocate using expansive monetary policy for short run gains in output and employment, as it would raise inflationary expectations and thus store up problems for the future. Instead, they advocate using monetary policy for stabilization. That is, suddenly increasing the money supply just to produce a temporary economic boom is not recommended as eliminating the increased inflationary expectations will be impossible without producing a recession.
However, when the economy is hit by some unexpected external shock, it may be a good idea to offset the macroeconomic effects of the shock with monetary policy. This is especially true if the unexpected shock is one (like a fall in consumer confidence) which tends to lower both output and inflation; in that case, expanding the money supply (lowering interest rates) helps by increasing output while stabilizing inflation and inflationary expectations.
Studies of optimal monetary policy in New Keynesian DSGE models have focused on interest rate rules (especially 'Taylor rules'), specifying how the central bank should adjust the nominal interest rate in response to changes in inflation and output. (More precisely, optimal rules usually react to changes in the output gap, rather than changes in output per se.) In some simple New Keynesian DSGE models, it turns out that stabilizing inflation suffices, because maintaining perfectly stable inflation also stabilizes output and employment to the maximum degree desirable. Blanchard and Galí have called this property the 'divine coincidence'.[71]
However, they also show that in models with more than one market imperfection (for example, frictions in adjusting the employment level, as well as sticky prices), there is no longer a 'divine coincidence', and instead there is a tradeoff between stabilizing inflation and stabilizing employment.[72] Further, while some macroeconomists believe that New Keynesian models are on the verge of being useful for quarter-to-quarter quantitative policy advice, disagreement exists.[73]
Alves (2014)[74] showed that the divine coincidence does not necessarily hold in the non-linear form of the standard New-Keynesian model. This property would only hold if the monetary authority is set to keep the inflation rate at exactly 0%. At any other desired target for the inflation rate, there is an endogenous trade-off, even under the absence real imperfections such as sticky wages, and the divine coincidence no longer holds.
Relation to other macroeconomic schools[edit]
Over the years, a sequence of 'new' macroeconomic theories related to or opposed to Keynesianism have been influential.[75] After World War II, Paul Samuelson used the term neoclassical synthesis to refer to the integration of Keynesian economics with neoclassical economics. The idea was that the government and the central bank would maintain rough full employment, so that neoclassical notions—centered on the axiom of the universality of scarcity—would apply. John Hicks' IS/LM model was central to the neoclassical synthesis.
Later work by economists such as James Tobin and Franco Modigliani involving more emphasis on the microfoundations of consumption and investment was sometimes called neo-Keynesianism. It is often contrasted with the post-Keynesianism of Paul Davidson, which emphasizes the role of fundamental uncertainty in economic life, especially concerning issues of private fixed investment.
New Keynesianism was a response to Robert Lucas and the new classical school.[76] That school criticized the inconsistencies of Keynesianism in the light of the concept of "rational expectations". The new classicals combined a unique market-clearing equilibrium (at full employment) with rational expectations. The New Keynesians used "microfoundations" to demonstrate that price stickiness hinders markets from clearing. Thus, the rational expectations-based equilibrium need not be unique.
Whereas the neoclassical synthesis hoped that fiscal and monetary policy would maintain full employment, the new classicals assumed that price and wage adjustment would automatically attain this situation in the short run. The new Keynesians, on the other hand, saw full employment as being automatically achieved only in the long run, since prices are "sticky" in the short run. Government and central-bank policies are needed because the "long run" may be very long.
Ultimately, the differences between new classical macroeconomics and New Keynesian economics were resolved in the new neoclassical synthesis of the 1990s, which forms the basis of mainstream economics today,[2][3][4] and the Keynesian stress on the importance of centralized coordination of macroeconomic policies (e.g., monetary and fiscal stimulus), international economic institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), and of the maintenance of a controlled trading system was highlighted during the 2008 global financial and economic crisis. This has been reflected in the work of IMF economists[77] and of Donald Markwell.[78]