We examine empirically whether asset prices and exchange rates may be admitted into a standard interest rate rule, using data for the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan since 1979. Asset prices and exchange rates can be employed as information variables for a standard “Taylor-type” rule or as arguments in an augmented interest rate rule. Our empirical evidence, based on measures of th...

Disinflationary episodes are a valuable source of information for economic agents trying to learn about the economy. This paper is especially interested in how a policymaker can themselves learn by disinflating. The approach differs from the existing literature, which typically focuses on the learning of private agents during a disinflation. We build a model where both the policymaker and priva...

This paper proves a certainty equivalence result for optimal policy under commitment with symmetric partial information about the state of the economy in a model with forwardlooking variables. This result is used in our previous paper [9], which synthesizes what is known about the case of symmetric partial information, and derives useful general formulas for computation of the optimal policy re...

This paper estimates a simple structural model of monetary policy in the UK for 1963-2000, focusing on the policy of inflation targeting introduced in 1992. Our main findings are: i) the adoption of inflation targets led to significant changes in monetary policy giving greater weight to inflation; (ii) monetary policy post-1992 is asymmetric as policy makers respond more to upward deviation of ...

Insurance Policies for Monetary Policy in the Euro Area* In this paper, we examine the cost of insurance against model uncertainty for the euro area considering four alternative reference models, all of which are used for policy analysis at the ECB. We find that maximal insurance across this model range in terms of a Minimax policy comes at moderate costs in terms of lower expected performance....

Since Keynes no economist would deny that expectations under uncertain conditions matter for the conduct of monetary policy, but still opinions about their formation are diverse. We build a hybrid New Keynesian Framework to analyze the in‡uence of model uncertainty on optimal interest rates under di¤erent degrees of rational forward-looking behavior, using recently developed robust control tech...

In this study, we perform a quantitative assessment of the role of money as an indicator variable for monetary policy in the euro area. We document the magnitude of revisions to euro area-wide data on output, prices, and money, and find that monetary aggregates have a potentially significant role in providing information about current real output. We then proceed to analyze the information cont...

This paper applies a state-space approach to estimate the implicit inflation target of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) since the adoption of the Inflation Targeting (IT) framework. The paper‟s findings are two. First, although the official inflation target range is 3–6 percent, in practice, the SARB seems to have aimed for the upper segment of the band (41 2 –6 percent) for most of the p...

Over the past twenty years, macroeconomic performance has improved in industrialized and developing countries alike. In a broad cross-section of countries inflation volatility has fallen markedly while output variability has either fallen or risen only slightly. This increased stability can be attributed to either: 1) more efficient policymaking by the monetary authority, 2) a reduction in the ...

We propose an Economic Stability Index (ESI) incorporating house prices and stock prices as components of the measure of the inflation rate in order to allow the European Central Bank (ECB) to achieve both price and macroeconomic stability. We use an optimisation approach to estimate target weights for different sectoral prices in the broader price index, which depend on sectoral parameters oth...