NONLINEAR MONETARY POLICY RULES: SOME NEW EVIDENCE FOR THE US

This paper dreives optimal monetary policy rules in setups where certainty equivalence does not hold because either central bank preferences are not quadratic, and/or the aggregate supply relation is nonlinear. Analytical results show that these features lead to sign and size aymmetries, and nonlinearities in the policy rule. Reduced-form estimates indicate that US monetary policy can be characterized by a nonlinear policy rule after 1983, but not before 1979. This finding is consistent with the view that the Fed`s inflation preferences during the Volcker-Greenspan regime differ considerably from the ones during the Burns-Miller regime.

Nonlinear monetary policy rules: some new evidence for the US

This paper dreives optimal monetary policy rules in setups where certainty equivalence does not hold because either central bank preferences are not quadratic, and/or the aggregate supply relation is nonlinear. Analytical results show that these features lead to sign and size aymmetries, and nonlinearities in the policy rule. Reduced-form estimates indicate that US monetary policy can be characterized by a nonlinear policy rule after 1983, but not before 1979. This finding is consistent with the view that the Fed`s inflation preferences during the Volcker-Greenspan regime differ considerably from the ones during the Burns-Miller regime

Barro-Gordon Revisited: Reputational Equilibria in a New Keynesian Model

The aim of this paper is to solve the inconsistency problem à la Barro and Gordon within a New Keynesian model and to derive time-consistent (stable) interest rate rules of Taylor-type. We find a multiplicity of stable rules. In contrast to the Kydland/Prescott-Barro/Gordon approach, implementing a monetary rule where the cost and benefit resulting from inconsistent policy coincide - which implies a net gain of inconsistent policy behavior equal to zero - is not optimal. Instead, the solution can be improved by moving into the time-consistent area where the net gain of inconsistent policy is negative. We moreover show that under a standard calibration, the standard Taylor rule is stable in the case of a cost-push shock as well as under simultaneous supply and demand shocks

Monetary Policy Regimes and the Volatility of Long-Term Interest Rates

This paper addresses two important questions that have, so far, been studied separately in the literature. First, the paper aims at explaining the high volatility of long-term interest rates observed in the data, which is hard to replicate using standard macro models. Building a small-scale macroeconomic model and estimating it on U.S. and U.K. data, I show that the policy responses of a central bank that is uncertain about the natural rate of unemployment can explain this volatility puzzle. Second, the paper aims at shedding new light on the distinction between rules and discretion in monetary policy. My empirical results show that using yield curve data may facilitate the empirical discrimination between different monetary policy regimes and that U.S. monetary policy is best understood as originating from a discretionary regime since 1960

Income Redistribution, Consumer Credit, and Keeping Up with the Riches

In this study, the relation between consumer credit and real economic activity during the Great Moderation is studied in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. Our model economy is populated by two different household types. Investors, who hold the economy's capital stock, own the firms and supply credit, and workers, who supply labor and demand credit to finance consumption. Furthermore, workers seek to minimize the difference between investors' and their own consumption level. Qualitatively, an income redistribution from labor to capital leads to consumer credit dynamics that are in line with the data. As a validation exercise, we simulate a three-shock version of the model and find that our theoretical set-up is able to reproduce important business cycle correlations