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Working Paper
Average Inflation Targeting: Time Inconsistency And Intentional Ambiguity
We study the implications of the Fed's new policy framework of average inflation targeting (AIT) and its ambiguous communication. The central bank has the incentive to deviate from its announced AIT and implement inflation targeting ex post to maximize social welfare. We show two motives for ambiguous communication about the horizon over which the central bank averages inflation as a result of time inconsistency. First, it is optimal for the central bank to announce different horizons depending on the state of the economy. Second, ambiguous communication helps the central bank gain ...
Working Paper
Average Inflation Targeting: Time Inconsistency And Intentional Ambiguity
We study the implications of the Fed's new policy framework of average inflation targeting (AIT) and its ambiguous communication. We show that AIT improves the trade-off between inflation and real activity by tilting the Phillips curve in a favorable way. To fully utilize this feature and maximize social welfare, the central bank has the incentive to deviate from AIT and implement inflation targeting ex post. Next, we rationalize the central bank's ambiguous communication about the horizon over which it averages inflation. Ambiguous communication, together with uncertainty about economic ...
Working Paper
Unbiased estimate of dynamic term structure models
Affine dynamic term structure models (DTSMs) are the standard finance representation of the yield curve. However, the literature on DTSMs has ignored the coefficient bias that plagues estimated autoregressive models of persistent time series. We introduce new simulation-based methods for reducing or even eliminating small-sample bias in empirical affine Gaussian DTSMs. With these methods, we show that conventional estimates of DTSM coefficients are severely biased, which results in misleading estimates of expected future short-term interest rates and long-maturity term premia. Our unbiased ...
Working Paper
A Macroeconomic Model of Central Bank Digital Currency
We develop a quantitative New Keynesian DSGE model with monopolistic banks to study the macroeconomic effects of introducing a central bank digital currency (CBDC). Households benefit from an expansion of liquidity services and higher deposit rates as bank deposit market power is curtailed, while bank profitability and lending decline. We assess this trade-off for a wide range of economies that differ in their level of interest rates. We find substantial welfare gains from introducing a CBDC with an optimal rate that can be approximated by a simple rule of thumb: the maximum between 0% and ...