We wish to understand the implications of recent shifts in US productivity for the structure of optimal monetary policy rules. Accordingly, we augment a standard inflation targeting model in which a forward-looking version of the Taylor rule constitutes the optimal monetary policy with regime...

We connect two major strands of the recent monetary policy literature, i) the search for well microfounded optimising models consistent with macroeconomic data, especially persistence in inflation, and ii) the wealth of newly available microeconomic data on price changing behaviour from the...

Papers estimating the reaction function of the Bundesbank generally find that ist monetary policy from the 1970s to 1998 can well be captured by a standard Taylor rule according to which the central bank responds to the output gap and to deviations of inflation from target, but not to monetary...

We analyze the microfoundations of the Phillips curve, a key relationship in general macroeconomics and models of monetary policy in particular. The form in current widespread use includes both forward looking expected inflation and lagged inflation. The presence of lagged inflation is necessary...

This paper sets out first, to quantify the stabilization gains from commitment in terms of household welfare and second, to examine how commitment to an optimal or approximately optimal rule can be sustained as an equilibrium in which reneging hardly ever occurs. We utilize an influential...