Recent research has shown that optimal monetary policy may display considerable price-level drift. Proponents of price-level targeting have argued that the costs of eliminating the price-level drift may be reduced if the central bank responds flexibly by returning the price level only gradually...

This Paper studies an advantage of commitment over discretion when a central bank observes only noisy measures of current inflation and output, in the context of an optimizing model with nominal-price stickiness. Under a commitment regime, if current policy turns out to be too expansionary...

Commitment in monetary policy leads to equilibria that are superior to those from optimal discretionary policies. A number of interest rate reaction functions and instrument rules have been proposed to implement or approximate commitment policy. We assess these optimal reaction functions and...

We review the recent work on interest rate setting, which emphasizes the desirability of designing policy to ensure stability under learning. Appropriately designed expectations-based rules can yield optimal rational expectations equilibria that are both determinate and stable under learning....

We compute the optimal non-linear interest rate policy under commitment for a forward-looking stochastic model with monopolistic competition and sticky prices when nominal interest rates are bounded below by zero. When the lower bound binds, the optimal policy is to reduce the real rate by...