A heated debate has arisen over the policy ineffectiveness proposition associate with the work of Lucas, Sargent, and Wallace. It postulates that anticipated aggregate demand policy will have no effect on business-cycle fluctuations, so that one deterministic, feedback policy rule is as good as any other from the point of view of stabilizing the economy. This paper develops a methodology for empirically analyzing rational-expectations models displaying this neutrality result and then applies it to the important question of whether anticipated monetary policy matters to the business cycle.

This paper is an application of efficient markets‐rationael xpectations theory to analyze empirically the relationship of money supply growth and short‐term interest rates, a hotly debated issue in the literature. This approach has the advantage over earlier research on this subject in that it imposes a theoretical structure that allows easier interpretation of the empirical results as well as more powerful statistical tests. The empirical results uniformly do not support the proposition that increases in money growth are correlated with declines in short rates.

A heated debate has arisen over the policy ineffectiveness proposition associate with the work of Lucas, Sargent, and Wallace. It postulates that anticipated aggregate demand policy will have no effect on business-cycle fluctuations, so that one deterministic, feedback policy rule is as good as any other from the point of view of stabilizing the economy. This paper develops a methodology for empirically analyzing rational-expectations models displaying this neutrality result and then applies it to the important question of whether anticipated monetary policy matters to the business cycle.

We investigate the stochastic relation between income and consumption (specifically, consumption of food) within a panel of about 2,000 households. Our major findings are: 1. Consumption responds much more strongly to permanent than to transitory movements of income. 2. The response to transitory income is nonetheless clearly positive. 3. A simple test, independent of our model of consumption, rejects a central implication of the pure life cycle-permanent income hypothesis. The observed covariation of income and consumption is compatible with pure life cycle-permanent income behavior on the part of80 percent of families and simple proportionality of consumption and income among the remaining 20 percent. As a general matter, our findings support the view that families respond differently to different sources of income variations. In particular, temporary income tax policies have smaller effects on consumption than do other, more permanent changes in income of the same magnitude.