Optimal Monetary Policy Under Sudden Stops

Optimal Monetary Policy in a ‘Sudden Stop’

During the Asian financial crises, interest rates were raised immediately, and then reduced sharply. We describe an environment in which this is the optimal monetary policy. ∗Northwestern University and Tilburg University. †Northwestern University, and NBER. ‡International Monetary Fund. §Braggion thanks the European Central Bank-Research Department for its hospitality. Christiano is grateful f...

Optimal Monetary Policy under Heterogeneous Expectations

Monetary policy has an important role in the determination of the inflation rate and the output gap time trajectories. Monetary authorities should choose the nominal interest rate time path that best serves the goals of price stability (primarily) and output growth (as a consequence of the first). In this paper it is presented a framework under which an optimal interest rate rule is computed, a...

Fiscal and monetary policies and the cost of sudden stops

This article investigates the effects of macroeconomic policy (monetary and fiscal) on output growth during financial crises characterized by a “sudden stop” in net capital inflows in developing and emerging market economies. We investigate 83 sudden stop crises in 77 countries over 1982-2003 using a baseline empirical model to control for the various determinants of output losses during sudden...

1 Optimal Monetary Policy

We re-examine optimal monetary policy when lump-sum taxes are unavailable. Under commitment, we show that, with alternative utility functions to that considered in Nicolini’s related analysis, the direction of the incentive to cheat may depend on the initial level of government debt, with low debt creating an incentive towards surprise deflation, but high debt the reverse. Under discretion, we ...

Optimal Monetary Stabilization Policy∗