Several papers have documented how the reaction function of the U.S. monetary authority has been passive, and destabilising, before Volcker"s appointment, and active and stabilising since then. In this paper we first compare the two sub-periods in terms of several key business-cycle 'stylised...

Various approaches to optimal monetary policy have been used to select time-invariant policy rules, including the timeless perspective approach by Woodford (1999) and the unconditional expected utility criterion of McCallum (2000). In this paper, we argue instead that policy rules should be...

In this paper, we study the effectiveness of monetary policy in a severe recession and deflation when nominal interest rates are bounded at zero. We compare two alternative proposals for ameliorating the effect of the zero bound: an exchange-rate peg and price-level targeting. We conduct this...