We study optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a New Keynesian model where occasional declines in agents' confidence can give rise to persistent liquidity trap episodes. Unlike in the case of fundamental-driven liquidity traps, there is no straightforward recipe for mitigating the welfare costs...

Assigning a discretionary central bank a mandate to stabilize an average in ation rate| rather than a period-by-period in ation rate|increases welfare in a New Keynesian model with an occasionally binding lower bound on nominal interest rates. Under rational expecta- tions, the...

A key insight from the open economy literature is that domestic price stability is in general not optimal for countries that exert some market power over their terms of trade. Under commitment, a national benevolent monetary policymaker improves upon the allocation associated with stable...

This paper develops a tractable model of a monetary union with a sound fiscal governance structure and shows how in such environment the design of monetary policy above and at the lower bound constraint on short-term interest rates can be linked to well-known findings from the literature dealing...