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Working Paper
Optimal time-consistent government debt maturity
The current literature on a government's optimal debt maturity structure contends that by purchasing short-term assets and selling long-term debt, it is possible to fully insulate the economy against fiscal shocks. The required short and long positions are large relative to GDP and constant. The market value of debt adjusts automatically and the constant debt positions and fluctuating bond prices insulate against potential shocks. However, achieving the goal of averting future shocks depends on the government perfectly committing to the future fiscal policy, for without this sustained ...
Working Paper
Monetary regime switches and unstable objectives
Monetary policy objectives and targets are not necessarily stable over time. The regime switching literature has typically analyzed and interpreted changes in policymakers' behavior through simple interest rate rules. This paper analyzes policy regime switches explicitly modeling policymakers' behavior and objectives. We show how current monetary policy is affected and should optimally respond to alternative regimes. We also show that changes in the parameters of simple rules do not necessarily correspond to changes in policymakers' preferences. In fact, capturing and interpreting regime ...
Working Paper
Inflation expectations and nonlinearities in the Phillips curve
This paper shows that a simple form of nonlinearity in the Phillips curve can explain why, following the Great Recession, inflation did not decrease as much as predicted by linear Phillips curves, a phenomenon known as the missing disinflation. We estimate a piecewise-linear specification and document that the data favor a model with two regions, with the response of inflation to an increase in unemployment slower in the region where unemployment is already high. Nonlinearities remain important, even when we account for other factors proposed in the literature, such as consumer expectations ...
Working Paper
Loose commitment
Due to time-inconsistency or policymakers' turnover, economic promises are not always fulfilled and plans are revised periodically. This fact is not accounted for in the commitment or the discretion approach. We consider two settings where the planner occasionally defaults on past promises. In the first setting, a default may occur in any period with a given probability. In the second, we make the likelihood of default a function of endogenous variables. We formulate these problems recursively, and provide techniques that can be applied to a general class of models. Our method can be used to ...
Working Paper
Loose commitment in medium-scale macroeconomic models: theory and applications
This paper proposes a method and a toolkit for solving optimal policy with imperfect commitment. As opposed to the existing literature, our method can be employed in medium- and large-scale models typically used in monetary policy. We apply our method to the Smets and Wouters (2007) model, where we show that imperfect commitment has relevant implications for interest rate setting, the sources of business cycle fluctuations, and welfare.
Working Paper
Interest Rate Surprises: A Tale of Two Shocks
Interest rate surprises around FOMC announcements reveal both the surprise in the monetary policy stance (the pure policy shock) and interest rate movements driven by exogenous information about the economy from the central bank (the information shock). In order to disentangle the effects of these two shocks, we use interest rate changes on days of macroeconomic data releases. On these release dates, there are no pure policy shocks, which allows us to identify the impact of information shocks and thereby distill pure policy shocks from interest rate surprises around FOMC announcements. Our ...
Working Paper
News and sovereign default risk in small open economies
This paper builds a model of sovereign debt in which default risk, interest rates, and debt depend not only on current fundamentals but also on news about future fundamentals. News shocks affect equilibrium outcomes because they contain information about the future ability of the government to repay its debt. First, in the model with news shocks not all defaults occur in bad times, bringing the model closer to the data. Second, the news shocks help account for key differences between emerging markets and developed economies: as the precision of the news improves the model predicts lower ...
Policy impact of unexpected Fed rate movements blurred by key information cues
Unexpected Federal Reserve monetary policy moves can profoundly affect market participants, investors and the economy. The impact of policy stems not only from its direct effects—the traditional focus for economists—but also from the new information revealed about the Fed’s economic outlook.
Working Paper
Designing a simple loss function for the Fed: does the dual mandate make sense?
Variable and high rates of price inflation in the 1970s and 1980s led many countries to delegate the conduct of monetary policy to "instrument-independent" central banks and to give their central banks a clear mandate to pursue price stability and instrument independence to achieve it. Advances in academic research supported a strong focus on price stability as a means to enhance the independence and credibility of monetary policymakers. An overwhelming majority of these central banks also adopted an explicit inflation target to further strengthen credibility and facilitate accountability. ...