Monetary Policy in a Low Interest Rate Environment

Global Knowledge, Local Solutions: Interest Rate and Monetary Policy

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...

Persistent Habits, Optimal Monetary Policy Inertia and Interest Rate Smoothing

Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models featuring imperfect competition and nominal rigidities have become central for the analysis of the monetary transmission mechanism and for understanding the conduct of monetary policy. However, it is agreed that the benchmark model fails to generate the persistence of output and in‡ation that is observed in the data. Moreover, it cannot provide a th...

Designing Monetary Policy : Backward - Looking Interest - Rate Rules ∗

When real balances have even a very small productive role, contemporaneous and forwardlooking Taylor-Wicksell rules can induce ubiquitous multiplicities of equilibria and lead to consequences that are unintended by policymakers. This raises the issue of whether it is possible to anchor and stabilize the economy through backward-looking rules. We show that the standard uniqueness results that ar...

Monetary Policy Issues in a Low Inflation Environment*

A remarkable feature of the economic performance of industrial countries in the postwar period is that there has been persistent inflation, in clear contrast to the XIX century and the period up to World-War I, which saw significant fluctuations in the general price level around a fairly stable mean. However, when one looks at inflation over the past thirty years, it is striking that, in contra...