Search Results
Journal Article
Monetary policy, transparency, and credibility: conference summary
This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on "Monetary Policy, Transparency, and Credibility" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on March 23 and 24, 2007.
Journal Article
Interest rates and monetary policy: conference summary
This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on "Interest Rates and Monetary Policy" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on March 19 and 20, 2004, under the joint sponsorship of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. The papers are listed at the end and are available at http://www.frbsf.org/economics/conferences/0403/index.html
Journal Article
Finance and macroeconomics
This Economic Letter summarizes papers presented at the conference "Finance and Macroeconomics" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on February 28 and March 1, 2003, under the joint sponsorship of the Bank and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. The papers are listed at the end and are available at http://www.frbsf.org/economics/conferences/0303/index.html.
Journal Article
New Keynesian models and their fit to the data
In this Economic Letter, we discuss the basic properties of hybrid New Keynesian models and examine the extent to which they successfully explain U.S. macroeconomic data.
Working Paper
Learning and optimal monetary policy
To conduct policy efficiently, central banks must use available data to infer, or learn, the relevant structural relationships in the economy. However, because a central bank's policy affects economic outcomes, the chosen policy may help or hinder its efforts to learn. This paper examines whether real-time learning allows a central bank to learn the economy's underlying structure and studies the impact that learning has on the performance of optimal policies under a variety of learning environments. Our main results are as follows. First, when monetary policy is formulated as an optimal ...
Working Paper
Solving for Optimal Simple Rules in Rational-Expectations Models
This paper presents techniques to solve for optimal simple monetary policy rules in rational expectations models, assuming discretion. The techniques described are notable for the flexibility they provide over the structure of the policy rule being solved for. Specifically, not all state variables need enter the policy rule allowing rules optimal conditional on a given information set to be easily constructed. The algorithms described are compared to related solution methods, and applied to the model in Clarida, Gali, and Gertler (1999).
Journal Article
Labor markets and the macroeconomy: conference summary
This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on "Labor Markets and the Macroeconomy" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on March 3 and 4, 2006.
Working Paper
Inferring policy objectives from economic outcomes
This paper stresses that estimated policy rules are reduced form equations that are silent on many important policy questions. To obtain a structural understanding of monetary policy it is necessary to estimate the policymaker's objective function, rather than its policy reaction function. With these issues in mind, this paper proposes a system-based estimation approach that uses the solution to the policymaker's optimization problem to infer the underlying policy regime from the economy's evolution over time. The paper derives conditions under which the parameters in a policymaker's policy ...
Journal Article
Uncertainty and monetary policy
Since uncertainty is such an important issue for policymakers it should come as no surprise that economists have made a study of its various guises and developed formal techniques to help understand and mitigate its effects. In this Letter I discuss, in broad-brush terms, some of these techniques and their implications for the conduct of monetary policy.
Working Paper
Monetary policy in a small open economy with a preference for robustness
We use robust control techniques to study the effects of model uncertainty on monetary policy in an estimated, semi-structural, small-open-economy model of the U.K. Compared to the closed economy, the presence of an exchange rate channel for monetary policy not only produces new trade-offs for monetary policy, but it also introduces an additional source of specification errors. We find that exchange rate shocks are an important contributor to volatility in the model, and that the exchange rate equation is particularly vulnerable to model misspecification, along with the equation for domestic ...