Working Paper

Can the U.S. monetary policy fall (again) in an expectation trap?


Abstract: We provide a tractable model to study monetary policy under discretion. We focus on Markov equilibria. For all parametrizations with an equilibrium inflation rate around 2%, there is a second equilibrium with an inflation rate just above 10%. Thus the model can simultaneously account for the low and high inflation episodes in the U.S. We carefully characterize the set of Markov equilibria along the parameter space and find our results to be robust.

Keywords: Inflation (Finance); Econometric models; Equilibrium (Economics); Monetary policy;

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File(s): File format is application/pdf http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/2006/860/ifdp860.pdf

Authors

Bibliographic Information

Provider: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.)

Part of Series: International Finance Discussion Papers

Publication Date: 2006

Number: 860