罗伯特卢卡斯获奖演章节《货币中性》资料.pdfVIP

MONETARY NEUTRALITY Prize Lecture, December 7, 1995 by R OBERT E. LUCA S , JR * University of Chicago, USA INTRODUCTION The work for which I have received this prize was part of an effort to under- stand how changes in the conduct of monetary policy can influence infla- tion, employment, and production. So much thought has been devoted to this question and so much evidence is available that one might reasonably assume that it had been solved long ago. But this is not the case: It had not been solved in the 1970s when I began my work on it, and even now this question has not been given anything like a fully satisfactory answer. In this lecture I will try to clarify what it is about the problem of bringing available evidence to bear on the assessment of different monetary policies that makes it so difficult, and to review the progress that has been made toward solving it in the last two decades. From the beginnings of modern monetary theory, in David Hume’s mar- velous essays of 1752, Of Money and Of Interest, conclusions about the effect of changes in money have seemed to depend critically on the way in which the change is effected. In formulating the doctrine that we now call the quantity theory of money, Hume stressed the units-change aspect of changes in the money stock, and the irrelevance of such changes t