The rent of shelter accounts for approximately a third of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Using a new housing rent index (RRI) developed by Ambrose, Coulson, and Yoshida (2014), we modify the CPI and compute the Taylor rule for the period from 2000 to 2010. With this timely rent index, Taylor rule becomes more consistent with the Federal funds rate than the conventional calculations. However, t...

This paper shows that monetary policy should be delegated to a central bank that cross-checks optimal policy with information from the Taylor rule. Attaching some weight to deviations of the interest rate from the interest rate prescribed by the Taylor rule is beneficial if the central bank aims at optimally stabilizing inflation and output gap variability under discretion. Placing a weight on ...

This paper examines under what conditions fiscal policy in the form of government spending should contribute to macroeconomic stabilisation. To this end optimal fiscal targeting rules minimising the microfounded social loss are examined in the following settings. Firstly, for the benchmark New Keynesian model, where monetary policy is unconstrained, a neutrality result for fiscal obtains: fisca...

How did the Federal Reserve Bank react to the stock market bubble of the late 1990s? At a Symposium sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in Jackson Hole, Wyoming on August 30, 2002, Chairman Alan Greenspan remarked that economists do not currently have a way to measure a stock market bubble convincingly. He also argued that in the absence of such a measure, it was difficult for ...

The Taylor rule establishes a simple linear relation between the interest rate, inflation and output gap. However, this relation may not be so simple. To get a deeper understanding of central banks’ behaviour, this paper asks whether central banks are indeed following a linear Taylor rule or, instead, a nonlinear rule. At the same time, it also analyses whether that rule can be augmented with a...

The paper discusses how current in ‡ation targeting should be modeled, and argues that it is better represented as a commitment to a targeting rule (a rule specifying operational objectives for monetary policy or a condition for the target variables), than as a commitment to a simple instrument rule (like a Taylor rule).

The paper discusses how current in ‡ation targeting should be modeled, and argues that it is better represented as a commitment to a targeting rule (a rule specifying operational objectives for monetary policy or a condition for the target variables), than as a commitment to a simple instrument rule (like a Taylor rule).

With the development of market-oriented economic reforms, Chinese monetary policy plays an important role in the world. The objective of this paper is to review the recent conduct of Chinese monetary policy and the central bank’s rule-based behavior in period 1994-2006 by estimating the monetary policy rules (monetary policy reaction function). It compares four kinds of monetary policy rules -T...