Interest Rate Uncertainty as a Policy Tool?

Global Knowledge, Local Solutions: Interest Rate and Monetary Policy

Irreversible capital accumulation under interest rate uncertainty

We consider the optimal sequential irreversible investment policy of a value maximizing firm facing decreasing returns to scale and interest rate uncertainty. We characterize the optimal accumulation policy and its value for a broad class of interest rate models by focusing on the marginal investment decision and deriving the marginal value of capital. We also state a set of conditions under wh...

Interest Rate Uncertainty and Economic Fluctuations

Uncertainty associated with the monetary policy transmission mechanism is a key driving force of business cycles. To investigate this link, we propose a new term structure model that allows the volatility of the yield curve to interact with macroeconomic indicators. The data favors a model with two volatility factors that capture shortterm and long-term interest rate uncertainty. Increases in e...

On Interest Rate Policy and Asset Bubbles

In a provocative paper, Gali (2014), showed that a policymaker who raises interest rates because of concerns about a bubble will paradoxically make the bubble bigger. In this paper, we argue Gali’s framework abstracts from the possibility that a policymaker who raises rates might crowd out resources that would have otherwise been spent on the bubble. We show that when we modify Gali’s model to ...

Monetary Policy Committees and Interest Rate Smoothing

We extend the New Keynesian Monetary Policy literature relaxing the assumption that the decisions are taken by a single policymaker, considering instead that monetary policy decisions are taken collectively in a committee. We introduce a Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), whose members have different preferences between output and inflation variability and have to vote on the level of the interes...