The Use of Inputs by the Federal Reserve System: Reply
回复对1983年论文的批评，该论文发现美联储面临将超额收入上缴财政部的约束，导致其增加雇员和官僚开支，从而产生通胀倾向。
In our 1983 paper we offered evidence that the law of demand operates inside the Federal Reserve. In particular, the Fed faces a requirement that it return all revenues in excess of operating expenses to the Treasury, and this constraint lowers the price of amenities in terms of foregone profits. The monetary authority accordingly buys more of the wage and nonwage perquisites of office than otherwise. Because we treated amenities as a monotone transformation of Federal Reserve System employment, our theory suggested that the Fed would pad its operating expenses by increasing the number of employees on its payroll. Moreover, given that expansionary open market operations raise the interest income earned by the Fed on its securities portfolio, bureaucratic incentives would impart an inflationary bias to monetary policy. In subsequent tests of the theory, we found a positive and significant ceteris paribus relationship between changes in the monetary base and the size of the Fed. This result suggested that one motivation for expansions in the money supply is to finance the growth in the Fed's bureaucracy. We also found evidence that employment causes money in the sense of Christopher Sims (1972), but not the reverse, and that the growth in Fed employment over time does not appear to have been due to the fact that more people are required to manage larger money stocks. In their comments, John Boyd and John Strong suggest that there are methodological and empirical problems with our paper. Both comments focus primarily on the, causality tests, but each raises other issues designed to cast doubt on the strength of our results. In what follows, we discuss the main points raised by our critics. I. Causality