We survey literature comparing in‡ation targeting (IT) and price-level targeting (PT) as macroeconomic stabilisation policies. Our focus is on New Keynesian models and areas that have seen signi…cant developments since Ambler’s (2009) survey: optimal monetary policy; the zero lower bound; …nancial frictions; and transition costs of adopting a PT regime. Ambler’s conclusion that PT improves soci...

T he discussion surrounding the recent deep recession seems to have shifted the focus from currently used business cycle models to the standard Keynesian model (by which we mean the “old Keynesian,” as opposed to the new Keynesian, model). In the Keynesian model, pessimism among consumers and investors about the economy will simultaneously lower aggregate consumption and aggregate investment, a...

Those of us who take an essentially Keynesian view in macroeconomics are often accused, somewhat unjustly, I believe, of minimizing the importance of monetary forces. That contention was probably true 20 years ago for a variety of historical and institutional reasons. But much water has passed over the dam since that time, and I believe it would now be difficult to find an example of the popula...

Central bankers’ conventional wisdom suggests that nominal interest rates should be raised to implement a lower inflation target. In contrast, I show that the standard New Keynesian monetary model predicts that nominal interest rates should be decreased to attain this goal. Real interest rates, however, are virtually unchanged. These results also hold in recent vintages of New Keynesian models ...

Walsh (2004) demonstrated that the robustly optimal targeting rule of Giannoni and Woodford (2003a, 2003b) and the targeting rule of a policy maker concerned with robustness in the sense of Hansen and Sargent (2004) were identical in a purely forward-looking new Keynesian model. In this note, I first show that the equivalence result extends to a new Keynesian model with inflation inertia (Woodf...

A simple model of monetary/labor search is constructed to study Keynesian indeterminacy and optimal policy. In the model, economic agents have trouble splitting the surplus from exchange appropriately, and we consider monetary and fiscal policies that correct this Keynesian inefficiency. A Taylor rule does not imply determinacy, nor does it support an efficient outcome. Optimal policies yield a...

Renewed interest in fiscal policy has increased the use of quantitative models to evaluate policy. Because of modelling uncertainty, it is essential that policy evaluations be robust to alternative assumptions. We find that models currently being used in practice to evaluate fiscal policy stimulus proposals are not robust. Government spending multipliers in an alternative empirically estimated ...

E agree about the goals of price stability, low unemployment and stable economic growth, but they disagree about the policies to achieve these goals. The disagreement is particularly heated over discretionary countercyclical Keynesian fiscal policy. After the poor macroeconomic performance of the 1970s and critical policy evaluations of the Keynesian approach— ranging from Robert E. Lucas and T...

The theory of capital investment is the cornerstone of the theory of macroeconomic dynamics, and the question of whether or not the agents involved in the investment decision have the information needed to make individually and collectively optimal choices is central to capital accumulation theory. New Classical and neoclassical theory assume that they do. Keynesian and Post Keynesian theory as...