Oil Shocks and Aggregate Macroeconomic Behavior: The Role of Monetary Policy: A Comment
评论Bernanke等人（1997）关于货币政策可消除石油价格冲击导致衰退的观点，质疑美联储实施激进政策的能力，并指出其估计的冲击效应偏小，即使激进政策也无法避免经济下滑。
A recent paper by Bernanke, Gertler, and Watson (1997) suggests that monetary policy could be used to eliminate any recessionary consequences of an oil price shock. This paper challenges this conclusion on two grounds. First, we question whether the Federal Reserve actually has the power to implement such a policy; for example, we consider it unlikely that additional money creation would have succeeded in reducing the Fed funds rate by 900 basis points relative to the values seen in 1974. Second, we point out that the size of the effect that Bernanke, Gertler, and Watson attribute to oil shocks is substantially smaller than that reported by other researchers, primarily due to their choice of a shorter lag length than that used by other researchers. We offer evidence in favor of the longer lag length employed by previous research and show that under this specification, even the aggressive Federal Reserve policies proposed would not have succeeded in averting a downturn.