Policy-makers in the United States over the past 15 to 20 years seem to have been cautious in setting policy: empirical estimates of monetary policy rules such as Taylor's (1993) rule are much less aggressive than those derived from optimizing models. The author analyzes the effect of an...

Classical oligopoly models predict that firms differentiate vertically as a way of softening price competition, but some metrics suggest very little quality differentiation in the U.S. auto insurance market. I explain this phenomenon using the fact that risk-averse insurance companies with...

Changes in risk perception have been used in various contexts to explain shorter-term developments in financial markets, as part of a mechanism that amplifies fluctuations in financial markets, as well as in accounts of "irrational exuberance." This approach holds that changes in risk perception...

The author models the choice between credit cards and home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) within a framework where consumers hold lines of credit as instruments of consumption smoothing across state and time. Flexible repayment schemes for lines of credit induce risk-averse consumers with...

The purpose of this paper is to make a quantitative contribution to the inflation versus price level targeting debate. It considers a policy-maker that can set policy either through an inflation targeting rule or a price level targeting rule to minimize a quadratic loss function using the actual...

The authors use the efficient hedging methodology for optimal pricing and hedging of equitylinked life insurance contracts whose payoff depends on the performance of several risky assets. In particular, they consider a policy that pays the maximum of the values of <em>n</em> risky assets at some maturity...

We examine the safety of government bonds in the presence of Knightian uncertainty amongst financial market participants. In our model, the information insensitivity of government bonds is driven by strategic complementarities across counterparties and the structure of trading relationships. We...

How can policy-makers avoid large policy errors when they are uncertain about the true model of the economy? The author discusses some recent approaches that can be used for that purpose under two alternative scenarios: (i) the policy-maker has one reference model for choosing policy but cannot...

There is currently a policy debate on potential refinements to monetary policy regimes in countries with low and stable inflation such as the U.S. and Canada. For example, in Canada, a systematic review of the current inflation targeting framework is underway. An issue that has generally...

Phillips curves are generally estimated under the assumption of linearity and parameter constancy. Linear models of inflation, however, have recently been criticized for their poor forecasting performance. The author investigates the linearity and constancy assumptions of a standard reduced-form...