In a standard overlapping generations model, active monetary policy reinforces mechanisms that lead to equilibrium indeterminacy and to countercyclical behavior of young-age consumption. The policy rule which minimizes inflation volatility can be active or passive, depending on the characteristics of shocks and the risk aversion of households. Inflation forecast errors are always greater under ...

Ten years of inflation targeting in New Zealand is used to test whether monetary policy conforms to the simple rules that have been recommended in the literature. While a Taylor rule with the standard parameters used in the US describes New Zealand monetary policy quite well, the Reserve Bank has focused more strongly on price stability, as required by its Policy Targets Agreements. Monetary po...

A number of recent papers have explored monetary policy options, including inflation targeting and inflation forecast targeting (notably Svensson (1999a, 1999b, 2000)) and price level targeting (Wolman 2000, Batini and Yates 1999, Blinder 1999). Most papers explore “optimal” monetary policy in the context of a single model. However, a number of conclusions made in the literature depend strongly...

Starting from a Post-Keynesian model in which employment is determined by effective demand and the NAIRU is viewed as a limit to employment, enforced by monetary policy reacting upon conflict inflation, the effects of central bank independence and labour market institutions on macroeconomic performance are considered and the perspectives for employment and inflation in the European Monetary Uni...

This paper proposes to investigate whether US monetary policy changed over time by evaluating evidence from the entire yield curve. A regime-switching no-arbitrage term structure model relies on inflation, output and the short interest rate as factors. In a departure from the finance literature, the model is complemented with identifying assumptions that allow the private sector (inflation and ...

This paper shows that the optimal monetary policies recommended by New Keynesian models still imply a large amount of inflation risk. We calculate the term structure of inflation uncertainty in New Keynesian models when the monetary authority adopts the optimal policy. When the monetary policy rules are modified to include some weight on a price path, the economy achieves equilibria with substa...

The recent macroeconomic literature stresses the importance of managing heterogeneous expectations in the formulation of monetary policy. We use a simple frictionless dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model to investigate inflation dynamics under alternative interest rate rules when agents have heterogeneous expectations, and update their beliefs based on past performance, as in Bro...