Overview
Charles I. Plosser is a macroeconomist and former President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia (2006–2015). Before his Fed career he was Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester. He co-founded the real business cycle literature with John Long (1983) and developed the balanced-growth framework for empirical RBC analysis with King, Stock, and Watson (1991). He is known as a monetary policy hawk and advocate for rules-based monetary policy.
Key Contributions / Features
- Real Business Cycles (Long-Plosser 1983): Introduced multi-sector RBC model driven by sector-specific productivity shocks; explained co-movements across sectors as optimal resource allocation responses. Journal of Political Economy 91: 39–69.
- Stochastic Trends and Economic Fluctuations (King-Plosser-Stock-Watson 1991): Applied balanced-growth cointegration restrictions to identify common stochastic trends in postwar U.S. data; found limited role for productivity shocks in a six-variable system including nominal variables. American Economic Review 81(4): 819–840.
- Production, Growth, and Business Cycles (King-Plosser-Rebelo 1988): Developed foundational multi-sector neoclassical RBC framework with trend growth. Journal of Monetary Economics 21: 309–342.
Related