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Working Paper
Monetary policy in a small open economy with a preference for robustness
We use robust control techniques to study the effects of model uncertainty on monetary policy in an estimated, semi-structural, small-open-economy model of the U.K. Compared to the closed economy, the presence of an exchange rate channel for monetary policy not only produces new trade-offs for monetary policy, but it also introduces an additional source of specification errors. We find that exchange rate shocks are an important contributor to volatility in the model, and that the exchange rate equation is particularly vulnerable to model misspecification, along with the equation for domestic ...
Conference Paper
Simple monetary policy rules and exchange rate uncertainty
We analyze the performance and robustness of some common simple rules for monetary policy in a new-Keynesian open economy model under different assumptions about the determination of the exchange rate. Adding the exchange rate to an optimized Taylor rule gives only slight improvements in terms of the volatility of important variables in the economy. Furthermore, although the rules including the exchange rate (and in particular, the real exchange rate) perform slightly better than the Taylor rule on average, they sometimes lead to very poor outcomes. Thus, the Taylor rule seems more robust to ...
Working Paper
How important is precommitment for monetary policy?
Economic outcomes in dynamic economies with forward-looking agents depend crucially on whether or not the central bank can precommit, even in the absence of the traditional "inflation bias." This paper quantifies the welfare differential between precommitment and discretionary policy in both a stylized theoretical framework and in estimated data-consistent models. From the precommitment and discretionary solutions we calculate the permanent deviation of inflation from target that in welfare terms is equivalent to moving from discretion to precommitment, the "inflation equivalent." In the ...
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 ...