In this Paper, we suggest a new motivation for why central banks appear averse to reversing recent changes in their interest rate. We show, in a standard monetary model with forward-looking expectations, data uncertainty and parameter uncertainty, that there is a learning cost associated with...

A central tenet of inflation targeting is that establishing and maintaining well-anchored inflation expectations are essential. In this paper, we reexamine the role of key elements of the inflation targeting framework towards this end, in the context of an economy where economic agents have an...

This paper develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with rational inattention. Households and decision-makers in firms have limited attention and decide how to allocate their attention. The paper studies the implications of rational inattention for business cycle dynamics. Impulse...

Some central banks have a reputation for being secretive. A justification for this behaviour that we find in the literature is that being transparent about operations and beliefs hinders the central bank in achieving the best outcome. In other words, a central bank needs flexibility and...

We develop a theoretical framework to quantitatively assess the general equilibrium effects and welfare implications of central bank reputation and transparency. Monetary policy alternates between periods of active inflation stabilization and periods during which the emphasis on inflation...

While high uncertainty is an inherent implication of entering the zero lower bound, deflation is not, because agents are likely to be uncertain about the way policy makers will deal with the large stock of debt arising from a severe recession. We draw this conclusion based on a standard...

Can monetary policy trigger pronounced boom-bust cycles in house prices and create persistent business cycles? We address this question by building heuristics into an otherwise standard DSGE model. As a result, monetary policy sets off waves of optimism and pessimism ('animal spirits') that...

Americans average 25.1 working hours per person in working age per week, but the Germans average 18.6 hours. The average American works 46.2 weeks per year, while the French average 40 weeks per year. Why do western Europeans work so much less than Americans? Recent work argues that these...

We study the optimal monetary policy in a two-country open-economy model under two monetary arrangements: (a) multiple currencies controlled by independent policy-makers; (b) common currencies controlled by a centralized policy-maker. Our findings suggest that: (i) Monetary policy competition...

We introduce mild increasing returns to scale into a version of the Real Business Cycle model. These increasing returns to scale occur as a consequence of sector-specific externalities, that is, externalities where the output of the consumption and investment sectors have external effects on the...