Bernanke's strategies for integrating forward guidance into conventional instrument rules anticipate that effective lower bound (ELB) episodes may become part a regular occurrence and that monetary policy should recognize this likelihood (Bernanke (2017a); Bernanke (2017b)). Bernanke's first...

This paper views the policy response to the recent financial crisis from the perspective of Milton Friedman's monetary economics. Five major aspects of the policy response are: 1) discount window lending has been provided broadly to the financial system, at rates low relative to the market rates...

Speed limit policy, a monetary policy strategy that focuses on stabilizing inflation and the change in the output gap, consistently delivers better welfare outcomes than flexible inflation targeting or flexible price level targeting in empirical New Keynesian models when policymakers lack the...

This note focuses on the longer-run implications of alternative monetary policy strategies for the evolution of the price level. The analysis compares the properties of optimal policy in regimes ranging from pure inflation targeting (IT), to a form of weighted-average inflation targeting (WAIT),...

When choosing a strategy for monetary policy, policymakers must grapple with mismeasurement of labor market slack, and of the responsiveness of price inflation to that slack. Using stochastic simulations of a small-scale version of the Federal Reserve Board’s principal New Keynesian...

Considerable attention has been devoted to evaluating the macroeconomic effectiveness of the Federal Reserve's communications about future policy rates (forward guidance) in light of the U.S. economy's long spell at the zero lower bound (ZLB). In this paper, we study whether forward guidance...

We simulate the FRB/US model and a number of statistical models to quantify some of the risks stemming from the effective lower bound (ELB) on the federal funds rate and to assess the efficacy of adjustments to the federal funds rate target, balance sheet policies, and forward guidance to...

We produce business cycle chronologies for U.S. states and evaluate the factors that change the probability of moving from one phase to another. We find strong evidence for positive duration dependence in all business cycle phases but find that the effect is modest relative to other state- and...

In expectations-driven liquidity traps, a higher inflation target is associated with lower inflation and consumption. As a result, introducing the possibility of expectations-driven liquidity traps to an otherwise standard model lowers the optimal inflation target. Using a calibrated New...

We analyze credible forward guidance policies in a sticky-price model with an effective lower bound (ELB) constraint on nominal interest rates by solving a series of optimal sustainable policy problems indexed by the duration of reputational loss. Lower-for-longer policies --- while effective in...