Limited Commitment, Inaction and Optimal Monetary Policy

This paper examines the optimal frequency of monetary policy meetings when their schedule is pre-announced. Our contribution is twofold. First, we show that in the standard New Keynesian framework infrequent but periodic revision of monetary policy may be desirable even when there are no explicit costs of policy adjustment. Adjustment of policy on a pre-announced schedule de facto acts as a commitment not to adjust in intermediate periods. We find that at short horizons gains from such commitment outweigh welfare costs of central bank's inaction. Second, we solve for the optimal frequency of policy adjustment and characterize its determinants. When applied to the U.S. economy, our analysis suggests that the Federal Open Markets Committee should revise the federal funds target rate no more than twice a year.central bank, monetary policy, commitment, stabilization bias.

Quadratic Time Computable Instances of MaxMin and MinMax Area Triangulations of Convex Polygons

We consider the problems of finding two optimal triangulations of a convex polygon: MaxMin area and MinMax area. These are the triangulations that maximize the area of the smallest area triangle in a triangulation, and respectively minimize the area of the largest area triangle in a triangulation, over all possible triangulations. The problem was originally solved by Klincsek by dynamic programming in cubic time [2]. Later, Keil and Vassilev devised an algorithm that runs in O(n^2 log n) time [1]. In this paper we describe new geometric findings on the structure of MaxMin and MinMax Area triangulations of convex polygons in two dimensions and their algorithmic implications. We improve the algorithm’s running time to quadratic for large classes of convex polygons. We also present experimental results on MaxMin area triangulation