This paper considers the desirability of the observed tendency of central banks to adjust interest rates only gradually in response to changes in economic conditions. It shows, in the context of a simple model of optimizing private-sector behavior, that such inertial behavior on the part of the...

The paper considers optimal monetary stabilization policy in a forward-looking model, when the central bank recognizes that private-sector expectations need not be precisely model-consistent, and wishes to choose a policy that will be as good as possible in the case of any beliefs that are close...

This paper proves a certainty equivalence result for optimal policy under commitment with symmetric partial information about the state of the economy in a model with forward-looking variables. This result is used in our previous paper, Indicator Variables for Optimal Policy,' which synthesizes...

In this paper we calculate robustly optimal monetary policy rules for several variants of a simple optimizing model of the monetary transmission mechanism with sticky prices and/or wages. We discuss representations of optimal policy both in terms of interest-rate feedback rules that generalize...

This paper proposes a general method for deriving an optimal monetary policy rule in the case of a dynamic linear rational-expectations model and a quadratic objective function for policy. A commitment to a rule of the type proposed results in a determinate equilibrium in which the responses to...

This paper reconsiders the Phelps-Lucas hypothesis, according to which temporary real effects of purely nominal disturbances result from imperfect information, but departs from the assumptions of Lucas (1973) in two crucial respects. Due to monopolistically competitive pricing, higher-order...

The optimal weights on indicators in models with partial information about the state of the economy and forward-looking variables are derived and interpreted, both for equilibria under discretion and under commitment. The private sector is assumed to have information about the state of the...

The optimal weights on indicators in models with partial information about the state of the economy and forward-looking variables are derived and interpreted, both for equilibria under discretion and under commitment. An example of optimal monetary policy with a partially observable potential...