This paper discusses how optimal monetary policy is affected by differences in the combination of shocks an economy experiences and the rigidities it exhibits. Without both nominal rigidities and economic shocks, monetary policy would be irrelevant. Recognizing this, policymakers increasingly...

Central bankers and financial supervisors often have different goals. While monetary policymakers want to ensure that there are always sufficient lending activities to maintain high and stable economic growth, supervisors work to limit banks. lending capacities in order to prevent excessive...

The debate over including asset prices in the construction of an inflation statistic has attracted renewed attention in recent years. Virtually all of this (and earlier) work on incorporating asset prices into an aggregate price statistic has been motivated by a presumed, but unidentified...

The design of rules for central bank policy has been a subject of increasing interest to many monetary economists. The purpose of this essay is first to present an analytical structure in which a policymaker is presumed to formulate a rule based on the solution to an optimal control problem, and...

As central bankers intensify their focus on inflation as the primary goal of monetary policy, it becomes increasingly important to have accurate and reliable measures of changes in the aggregate price level. Measuring inflation is surprisingly difficult, involving two types of problems. Commonly...

In recent years, central bankers throughout the world have advocated that monetary policy shift toward inflation targeting. Recent actions in the U.S. serve to highlight the desire of the Federal Reserve to keep inflation both low and stable, while downplaying the likely output and employment...

This paper investigates the effects of wage indexation on the time-consistent level of inflation. Departing from previous work on time-consistent policy, we study a structural model of the economy. Indexation reduces the cost of inflation, which is inflationary, and steepens the Phillips curve,...