Matthew Wilson (University of Oregon) presented his job market paper “A Real Business Cycle Model with Money as a Sunspot Variable”.

Abstract: A well-known criticism of the RBC model is that it cannot match the data on money. Due to the perfect flexibility of prices and the absence of frictions, any exogenous increase in the money supply will be fully offset by wage and price increases, implying that money is neutral even in the short run. However, beliefs that money is non-neutral could become a self-fulfilling prophesy. By using money as a sunspot variable in an RBC model, I successfully replicate many of the correlations in the data, even though money does not directly affect the economy’s fundamentals. This shows that models with flexible prices are not necessarily incompatible with the monetary data and offers support for the use of sunspot variables in macroeconomics.

The paper can be found here.