Essays in monetary economics

Each chapter in this dissertation contributes to our understanding of international aspects of monetary policy. These international aspects of monetary policy include the effects of U.S. monetary policy shocks on foreign economic activity and on prices of widely traded international commodities, as well as the international comovement of inflation during the Great Inflation.;The first chapter estimates the effects of U.S. monetary policy shocks in a selection of other economies in the Americas. Across a range of measures of U.S. policy shocks, U.S. monetary contractions are followed by reductions in economic activity in Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Canada. For each measure of U.S. shocks, the size and timing of the response of foreign output is similar to the size and timing of the response of U.S. output to U.S. monetary shocks. Expenditure-switching channels appear unlikely candidates for explaining the transmission of U.S. shocks to foreign output. Instead, transmission appears to work through financial channels: foreign central banks raise interest rates and contract money supplies in response to a U.S. monetary contraction, and there is some evidence for large movements in prices of commodities such as coffee, copper, lumber, and oil.;The second chapter explores the influence of monetary policy shocks on commodity prices. It uses annual, monthly, and daily data, and shows that regressions of commodity prices on interest rates at lower frequencies yield spurious results. To achieve identification, I use high-frequency measures of monetary policy shocks based on federal funds futures rates. I find that monetary policy shocks appear to exert limited short-run influence over commodity prices, in contrast to the effects of monetary policy shocks on other financial market prices.;The third chapter explores an aspect of the Great Inflation, a period of time during the second half of the twentieth century in which inflation rose substantially and then fell back to previous levels across a wide range of countries. The rise and fall of inflation during the Great Inflation were events of approximately equal duration in developed economies. Relying on data-driven methods, this chapter shows the American experience, in which inflation fell more quickly than it rose, was anomalous. This suggests that theories explaining the asymmetry in the American data may not be applicable to a broader sample of countries.