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Journal Article
Time-inconsistent monetary policies: recent research
This Economic Letter looks at time-inconsistency, describing why the same mechanisms that can lead to higher average inflation also can hamper policymakers' efforts to keep inflation stable.
Working Paper
The Optimal Degree of Monetary-Discretion in a New Keynesian Model with Private Information
This paper considers the optimal degree of monetary-discretion when the central bank conducts policy based on its private information about the state of the economy and is unable to commit. Society seeks to maximize social welfare by imposing restrictions on the central bank's actions over time, and the central bank takes these restrictions and the New Keynesian Phillips curve as constraints. By solving a dynamic mechanism design problem we find that it is optimal to grant ?constrained discretion? to the central bank by imposing both upper and lower bounds on permissible inflation, and that ...
Journal Article
Monetary policy and exchange rates in small open economies
Journal Article
Monetary policy, transparency, and credibility: conference summary
This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on "Monetary Policy, Transparency, and Credibility" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on March 23 and 24, 2007.
Journal Article
Interest rates and monetary policy: conference summary
This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on "Interest Rates and Monetary Policy" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on March 19 and 20, 2004, under the joint sponsorship of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. The papers are listed at the end and are available at http://www.frbsf.org/economics/conferences/0403/index.html
Journal Article
Finance and macroeconomics
This Economic Letter summarizes papers presented at the conference "Finance and Macroeconomics" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on February 28 and March 1, 2003, under the joint sponsorship of the Bank and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. The papers are listed at the end and are available at http://www.frbsf.org/economics/conferences/0303/index.html.
Working Paper
Methods for robust control
Robust control allows policymakers to formulate policies that guard against model misspecification. The principal tools used to solve robust control problems are state-space methods (see Hansen and Sargent 2006 and Giordani and Soderlind 2004). In this paper we show that the structural-form methods developed by Dennis (2006) to solve control problems with rational expectations can also be applied to robust control problems, with the advantage that they bypass the task, often onerous, of having to express the reference model in statespace form. Interestingly, because state-space forms and ...
Working Paper
Timeless perspective policymaking: When is discretion superior?
In this paper I show that discretionary policymaking can be superior to timeless perspective policymaking and identify model features that make this outcome more likely. Developing a measure of conditional loss that treats the auxiliary state variables that characterize the timeless perspective equilibrium appropriately, I use a New Keynesian DSGE model to show that discretion can dominate timeless perspective policymaking when the Phillips curve is relatively flat, due, perhaps, to firm-specific capital (or labor) and/or Kimball (1995) aggregation in combination with nominal price rigidity. ...
Working Paper
Specifying and estimating New Keynesian models with instrument rules and optimal monetary policies
This paper estimates several popular sticky-price New Keynesian models in an effort to understand whether and under what circumstances these models can usefully describe observed outcomes. We estimate and compare specifications that contain different forms of habit formation, specifications that have either the gap or real marginal costs driving inflation, and specifications that use either optimal policymaking or a forward-looking Taylor-type rule to summarize monetary policy. Among other results, we find that the different forms of habit formation lead to very similar aggregate behavior, ...
Journal Article
Policy applications of a global macroeconomic model
In this Economic Letter, we summarize the key components of the GVAR model and discuss its usefulness for monetary policy applications and for credit risk management issues faced by financial institutions and their government supervisors. We argue that while the GVAR model is probably useful for credit risk management and could potentially have some use for bank supervision, it is unlikely to be as useful for monetary policy applications.