Search Results
Speech
Inflation Targeting: Securing the Anchor
Remarks at The Future of Inflation Targeting, Bank of England, London, U.K.
Journal Article
Evaluating Monetary Policy with Inflation Bands and Horizons
Inflation targeting has become the dominant way countries approach setting monetary policy goals. However, central banks differ in how they conduct that policy and how they evaluate their success in meeting a stated inflation goal. A new assessment method combines a percentage range around a target, known as an inflation tolerance band, with central banks stating how long it will take for high or low inflation to return to that range, known as a time horizon. Comparing previously projected horizons with realized horizons can be used to evaluate policy success.
Working Paper
Conservatism and Liquidity Traps
Appointing Rogoff's (1985) conservative central banker improves welfare if the economy is subject to large contractionary shocks and the policy rate occasionally falls to the zero lower bound (ZLB). In an economy with occasionally binding ZLB constraints, the anticipation of future ZLB episodes creates a trade-off between inflation and output stabilization. As a consequence, inflation systematically falls below target even when the policy rate is above zero. A conservative central banker mitigates this deflationary bias away from the ZLB, improving allocations both at and away from the ZLB ...
Working Paper
Average Is Good Enough: Average-Inflation Targeting and the ELB
The Great Recession and current pandemic have focused attention on the constraint on nominal interest rates from the effective lower bound. This has renewed interest in monetary policies that embed makeup strategies, such as price-level or average-inflation targeting. This paper examines the properties of average-inflation targeting in a two-agent New Keynesian (TANK) model in which a fraction of firms have adaptive expectations. We examine the optimal degree of history dependence under average-inflation targeting and find it to be relatively short for business cycle shocks of standard ...
Working Paper
Assessing Central Bank Commitment to Inflation Targeting: Evidence from Financial Market Expectations in India
We propose a novel framework to gauge the credibility of central banks’ commitment to an inflation-targeting regime. Our framework combines survey data on macroeconomic forecasts with high-frequency financial market data to understand how inflation targeting makes economic agents change their perception about central bank decisions. Specifically, using the Reserve Bank of India’s adoption of inflation targeting in 2015 as a laboratory, we apply two different approaches to estimate a market-perceived monetary policy rule and analyze how it changed with the implementation of inflation ...
Working Paper
Communicating Monetary Policy Rules
Despite the ubiquity of inflation targeting, central banks communicate their frameworks in a variety of ways. No central bank explicitly expresses their conduct via a policy rule, which contrasts with models of policy. Central banks often connect theory with their practice by publishing inflation forecasts that can, in principle, implicitly convey their reaction function. We return to this central idea to show how a central bank can achieve the gains of a rule-based policy without publicly stating a specific rule. The approach requires central banks to specify an inflation target, inflation ...
Report
Comparing forecast-based and backward-looking Taylor rules: a "global" analysis
This paper examines the performance of forecast-based nonlinear Taylor rules in a class of simple microfunded models. The paper shows that even if the policy rule leads to a locally determinate (and stable) inflation target, there exist other learnable "global" equilibria such as cycles and sunspots. Moreover, under learning dynamics, the economy can fall into a liquidity trap. By contrast, more backward-looking and "active" Taylor rules guarantee that the unique learnable equilibrium is the inflation target. This result is robust to different specifications of the role of money, price ...
Working Paper
Raising the Inflation Target: How Much Extra Room Does It Really Give?
Some, but less than intended. The reason is a shift in the behavior of the private sector: Prices adjust more frequently, lowering the potency of monetary policy. We quantitatively investigate this channel across different models, based on a calibration using micro data. By raising the target from 2 percent to 4 percent, the monetary authority gets only between 0.51 and 1.60 percentage points of effective extra policy room for monetary policy (not 2 percentage points as intended). Getting 2 percentage points of effective extra room requires raising the target to more than 4 percent. Taking ...
Speech
Monetary policy strategies for a low-neutral-interest-rate world: remarks at the 80th Plenary Meeting of the Group of Thirty, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City
Remarks at the 80th Plenary Meeting of the Group of Thirty, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City.
Working Paper
Monetary Policy and Durable Goods
We analyze monetary policy in a New Keynesian model with durable and nondurable goods each with a separate degree of price rigidity. The model behavior is governed by two New Keynesian Phillips Curves. If durable goods are sufficiently long-lived we obtain an intriguing variant of the well-known ?divine coincidence.? In our model, the output gap depends only on inflation in the durable goods sector. We then analyze the optimal Taylor rule for this economy. If the monetary authority wants to stabilize the aggregate output gap, it places much more emphasis on stabilizing durable goods inflation ...