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Report
The central-bank balance sheet as an instrument of monetary policy
While many analyses of monetary policy consider only a target for a short-term nominal interest rate, other dimensions of policy have recently been of greater importance: changes in the supply of bank reserves, changes in the assets acquired by central banks, and changes in the interest rate paid on reserves. We first extend a standard New Keynesian model to allow a role for the central bank?s balance sheet in equilibrium determination and then consider the connections between these alternative policy dimensions and traditional interest rate policy. We distinguish between ?quantitative ...
Conference Paper
Inflation forecasts and monetary policy
Working Paper
Credit frictions and optimal monetary policy
We extend the basic (representative-household) New Keynesian [NK] model of the monetary transmission mechanism to allow for a spread between the interest rate available to savers and borrowers, that can vary for either exogenous or endogenous reasons. We find that the mere existence of a positive average spread makes little quantitative difference for the predicted effects of particular policies. Variation in spreads over time is of greater significance, with consequences both for the equilibrium relation between the policy rate and aggregate expenditure and for the relation between real ...
Report
Conventional and unconventional monetary policy
We extend a standard New Keynesian model both to incorporate heterogeneity in spending opportunities along with two sources of (potentially time-varying) credit spreads and to allow a role for the central bank's balance sheet in determining equilibrium. We use the model to investigate the implications of imperfect financial intermediation for familiar monetary policy prescriptions and to consider additional dimensions of central bank policy--variations in the size and composition of the central bank's balance sheet as well as payment of interest on reserves--alongside the traditional question ...
Conference Paper
Optimal monetary policy inertia
Conference Paper
Monetary policy in the information economy
Working Paper
Optimal monetary and fiscal policy: a linear-quadratic approach
We propose an integrated treatment of the problems of optimal monetary and fiscal policy, for an economy in which prices are sticky (so that the supply-side effects of tax changes are more complex than in standard fiscal analyses) and the only available sources of government revenue are distorting taxes (so that the fiscal consequences of monetary policy must be considered alongside the usual stabilization objectives). Our linear-quadratic approach allows us to nest both conventional analyses of optimal monetary stabilization policy and analyses of optimal tax-smoothing as special cases of ...
Conference Paper
How forward-looking is optimal monetary policy?
We calculate optimal monetary policy rules for several variants of a simple optimizing model of the monetary transmission mechanism with sticky prices and/or wages. We show that robustly optimal rules can be represented by interest-rate feedback rules that generalize the celebrated proposal of Taylor (1993). Optimal rules, however, require that the current interest rate operating target depend positively on the recent past level of the operating target, and its recent rate of increase, in a way that is characteristic of estimated central bank reaction functions, but not of Taylor's proposal.
Conference Paper
The quantitative analysis of the basic neomonetarist model
Report
Optimal target criteria for stabilization policy
This paper considers a general class of nonlinear rational-expectations models in which policymakers seek to maximize an objective function that may be household expected utility. We show how to derive a target criterion that is 1) consistent with the model?s structural equations, 2) strong enough to imply a unique equilibrium, and 3) optimal, in the sense that a commitment to adjust the policy instrument at all dates so as to satisfy the target criterion maximizes the objective function. The proposed optimal target criterion is a linear equation that must be satisfied by the projected paths ...