Should monetary policy be more aggressive or more cautious when facing uncertainty on the relationship between macroeconomic variables? This paper's answer is: “it depends” on the degree of persistence of the shocks that hit the economy. The paper studies optimal monetary policy in a basic...

We model an economy with long-term mortgages and show that some characteristics of mortgage contracts – such as the type of interest rate (adjustable versus fixed) and the loan-to-value ratio – matter for the transmission of monetary policy impulses, both conventional and unconventional. A...

In this paper we show that long-run expectations about future housing prices of both households and, especially, financial intermediaries had a large impact on households' indebtedness during the recent boom in U.S. housing prices. We introduce the theory of natural expectations in a...