Real world monetary policy is complicated by long and variable lags in the transmission of the policy to the economy. Most of the policy models, however, abstracts from policy lags. This paper presents a model where transmission lags depend on the behaviour of a two-sector supply side of the...

Monetary policy transmission lags create credibility problems for the inflation-targeting policy maker who acts under discretion. We show that if prices react to monetary policy with a longer lag than output, the welfare maximizing inflation-targeting policy implies no policy stabilization of...

Using stochastic simulations of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand s macroeconomic model, this paper examines the implications for monetary policy of uncertainty about the length of the monetary policy transmission lag. Uncertainty is examined from two perspectives. The first investigates the...

Using a closed-economy model, Jensen (2002) and Walsh (2003) have, respectively, shown that a policy regime that optimally targets nominal income growth (NIT) or the change in the output gap (SLT) outperforms a regime that targets inflation, because NIT and SLT induce more inertia in the actions...

This paper examines implications for monetary policy of uncertainty about the length of the monetary policy transmission lag in a stochastic environment. Two key questions are asked. Firstly, which type of inflation-forecast-based rules work well when the central bank does not know the length of...

Alternative modeling strategies for specifying subset VAR models are considered. It is shown that under certain conditions a testing procedure based on t-ratios is equivalent to sequentially eliminating lags that lead to the largest improvement in a prespecified model selection criterion. A...