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Working Paper
Monetary Policy, Uncertainty, and Communications
We review the design and communication of monetary policy strategies that take into account risks and uncertainty. A key element in a robust monetary strategy is the concept of risk management, which is the weighing of key risks when setting policy. When risks to the outlook are balanced, the baseline outlook may be sufficient to guide policy decisions. However, risk-management considerations become important when risks are asymmetric. We discuss how robust simple interest rate rules and optimal control policy can incorporate risk-management considerations into the design of a monetary ...
Working Paper
Optimal Contracts, Aggregate Risk, and the Financial Accelerator
This paper derives the optimal lending contract in the financial accelerator model of Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999), hereafter BGG. The optimal contract includes indexation to the aggregate return on capital, household consumption, and the return to internal funds. This triple indexation results in a dampening of fluctuations in leverage and the risk premium. Hence, compared with the contract originally imposed by BGG, the privately optimal contract implies essentially no financial accelerator.
Working Paper
Privately optimal contracts and suboptimal outcomes in a model of agency costs
This paper derives the privately optimal lending contract in the celebrated financial accelerator model of Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999). The privately optimal contract includes indexation to the aggregate return on capital, household consumption, and the return to internal funds. Although privately optimal, this contract is not welfare maximizing as it leads to a sub-optimally high price of capital. The welfare cost of the privately optimal contract (when compared to the planner outcome) is significant. A menu of time-varying taxes and subsidies can decentralize the planner?s ...
Working Paper
Inflation and output in New Keynesian models with a transient interest rate peg
Recent monetary policy experience suggests a simple diagnostic for models of monetary non-neutrality. Suppose the central bank pegs the nominal interest rate below steady state for a reasonably short period of time. Familiar intuition suggests that this should be modestly inflationary, and a reasonable model should deliver such a prediction. We pursue this simple diagnostic in several variants of the familiar Dynamic New Keynesian (DNK) model. Some variants of the model produce counterintuitive inflation reversals where the effect of the interest rate peg can switch from highly inflationary ...
Working Paper
Fiscal multipliers under an interest rate peg of deterministic vs. stochastic duration
This paper revisits the size of the fiscal multiplier. The experiment is a fiscal expansion under the assumption of a pegged nominal rate of interest. We demonstrate that a quantitatively important issue is the articulation of the exit from the policy experiment. If the monetary-fiscal expansion is stochastic with a mean duration of T periods, the fiscal multiplier can be unboundedly large. However, if the monetary-fiscal expansion is for a fixed T periods, the multiplier is much smaller.
Working Paper
How inflationary is an extended period of low interest rates?
Recent monetary policy experience suggests a simple test of models of monetary non-neutrality. Suppose the central bank pegs the nominal interest rate below steady state for a reasonably short period of time. Familiar intuition suggests that this should be inflationary. But a monetary model should be rejected if a reasonably short nominal rate peg results in an unreasonably large inflation response. We pursue this simple test in three variants of the familiar dynamic new Keynesian (DNK) model. All of these models fail this test. Further some variants of the model produce inflation reversals ...
Journal Article
Inflation: Drivers and Dynamics 2019 Conference Summary
To provide insights into the processes that drive inflationary dynamics, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland holdsan annual conference on the topic of inflation: “Inflation: Drivers and Dynamics.” This Commentary summarizes thepapers presented at the 2019 conference.
Working Paper
Targeting Long Rates in a Model with Segmented Markets
This paper develops a model of segmented financial markets in which the net worth of financial institutions limits the degree of arbitrage across the term structure. The model is embedded into the canonical Dynamic New Keynesian (DNK) framework. We estimate the model using data on the term premium. Our principal results include the following. First, the estimated segmentation coefficient implies a nontrivial effect of central bank asset purchases on yields and real activity. Second, there are welfare gains to having the central bank respond to the term premium, eg., including the term premium ...