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Working Paper
The Risk-Adjusted Monetary Policy Rule
Macroeconomists are increasingly using nonlinear models to account for the effects of risk in the analysis of business cycles. In the monetary business cycle models widely used at central banks, an explicit recognition of risk generates a wedge between the inflation-target parameter in the monetary policy rule and the risky steady state (RSS) of inflation---the rate to which inflation will eventually converge---which can be undesirable in some practical applications. We propose a simple modification to the standard monetary policy rule to eliminate the wedge. In the proposed risk-adjusted ...
Discussion Paper
Credibility of Optimal Forward Guidance at the Interest Rate Lower Bound
Market participants and other analysts generally expect that the federal funds rate will rise from its effective lower bound (ELB) later this year. However, the ELB could again become a binding constraint on monetary policy in the future.
Working Paper
Optimal Inflation Target with Expectations-Driven Liquidity Traps
In expectations-driven liquidity traps, a higher inflation target is associated with lower inflation and consumption. As a result, introducing the possibility of expectations-driven liquidity traps to an otherwise standard model lowers the optimal inflation target. Using a calibrated New Keynesian model with an effective lower bound (ELB) constraint on nominal interest rates, we find that even a very small probability of falling into an expectations-driven liquidity trap lowers the optimal inflation target nontrivially. Our analysis provides a reason to be cautious about the argument that ...
Discussion Paper
Model-Based Measures of ELB Risk
The target range for the federal funds rate has increased a few times since its liftoff from the effective lower bound (ELB) in December 2015 and currently stands at 1 to 1-1/4 percent. According to standard macroeconomic models, ELB risk--how likely it is for the policy rate to be constrained by the ELB in the near- and medium-term future--has important implications for interest rate policy. In this note, I construct measures of ELB risk by combining survey-based projections of the U.S. economy with stochastic simulations of the FRB/US model, a large-scale model of the US economy maintained ...
Working Paper
Gradualism and Liquidity Traps
Modifying the objective function of a discretionary central bank to include an interest-rate smoothing objective increases the welfare of an economy in which large contractionary shocks occasionally force the central bank to lower the policy rate to its effective lower bound. The central bank with an interest-rate smoothing objective credibly keeps the policy rate low for longer than the central bank with the standard objective function. Through expectations, the temporary overheating of the economy associated with such a low-for-long interest rate policy mitigates the declines in inflation ...
Working Paper
A Promised Value Approach to Optimal Monetary Policy
This paper characterizes optimal commitment policy in the New Keynesian model using a novel recursive formulation of the central bank's infinite horizon optimization problem. In our recursive formulation motivated by Kydland and Prescott (1980), promised inflation and output gap---as opposed to lagged Lagrange multipliers---act as pseudo-state variables. Using three well known variants of the model---one featuring inflation bias, one featuring stabilization bias, and one featuring a lower bound constraint on nominal interest rates---we show that the proposed formulation sheds new light on the ...
Working Paper
Fiscal Multipliers at the Zero Lower Bound: The Role of Policy Inertia
The presence of the lagged shadow policy rate in the interest rate feedback rule reduces the government spending multiplier nontrivially when the policy rate is constrained at the zero lower bound (ZLB). In the economy with policy inertia, increased inflation and output due to higher government spending during a recession speed up the return of the policy rate to the steady state after the recession ends. This in turn dampens the expansionary effects of the government spending during the recession via expectations. In our baseline calibration, the output multiplier at the ZLB is 2.5 when the ...
Working Paper
Small Sample Properties of Bayesian Estimators of Labor Income Processes
There exists an extensive literature estimating idiosyncratic labor income processes. While a wide variety of models are estimated, GMM estimators are almost always used. We examine the validity of using likelihood based estimation in this context by comparing the small sample properties of a Bayesian estimator to those of GMM. Our baseline studies estimators of a commonly used simple earnings process. We extend our analysis to more complex environments, allowing for real world phenomena such as time varying and heterogeneous parameters, missing data, unbalanced panels, and non-normal errors. ...
Discussion Paper
Optimal Monetary Policy in a DSGE Model with Attenuated Forward Guidance Effects
In this article, we explore the implications of attenuating the power of forward guidance for the optimal conduct of forward guidance policy in a quantitative DSGE model of the U.S. economy.
Working Paper
Optimal fiscal and monetary policy with occasionally binding zero bound constraints
This paper studies optimal government spending and monetary policy when the nominal interest rate is subject to the zero lower bound constraint in a stochastic New Keynesian economy. I find that the government chooses to increase its spending when at the zero lower bound by a substantially larger amount in the stochastic environment than it would in the deterministic environment. The presence of uncertainty creates a unique time-consistency problem if the steady-state is inefficient. Although access to government spending policy increases welfare in the face of a large deflationary shock, it ...