This paper evaluates alternative rules by which the Fed may set interest rates using the small model of the U.S. economy estimated in Rotemberg and Woodford (1997). Our main substantive finding is that low and stable inflation together with stable interest rates can be achieved by letting the...

Erceg et al. (2000) show that when both wages and prices are sticky, maximization of expected utility is equivalent to minimizing a loss function with three terms, involving measures of the variability of wage inflation, price inflation and the output gap respectively. Here we generalize their...

We analytically characterize optimal monetary policy for an augmented New Keynesian model with a housing sector. With rational private sector expectations about housing prices and inflation, optimal monetary policy can be characterized by a standard “target criterion” in terms of inflation...