A burgeoning part of the monetary policy design literature posits that optimal monetary policy is the solution to a constrained optimization problem where the monetary authority has the discretion to minimize a social welfare function, taking the economy and other policies as given. In their paper “Is Optimal Monetary Policy Always Optimal?” Troy Davig and Refet Gurkaynak (henceforth, DG) argue...

The present paper reassesses the role of monetary conservatism in a setting with nominal government debt and endogenous fiscal policy. We assume that macroeconomic policies are chosen by monetary and fiscal policy makers who interact repeatedly but cannot commit to future actions. The real level of public liabilities is an endogenous state variable, and policies are chosen in a non-cooperative ...

The recent crisis has highlighted the need for a “macroprudential policy” ensuring financial stability. One of the key aspects of this forthcoming macroprudential policy is the setting of bank capital requirements conditionally on the state of the economy—what the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (2010) calls the “countercyclical capital buffer.” This raises the issue of the interactions ...