We show that optimal monetary and fiscal policies are time consistent for a class of economies often used in applied work, economies appealing because they are consistent with the growth facts. We establish our results in two steps. We first show that for this class of economies, the Friedman...

What are the economic effects of an interest rate cut when an economy is in the midst of a financial crisis? Under what conditions will a cut stimulate output and employment, and raise welfare? Under which will it have the opposite effects? The authors answer these questions in a general class...

The authors use the limited participation model of money to study Taylor rules' operating characteristics for setting the interest rate. Rules are evaluated according to their ability to protect the economy from bad outcomes like the burst of inflation observed in the 1970s. On the basis of...

The authors consider inflation and government debt dynamics when monetary policy employs a global interest rate rule and private agents forecast using adaptive learning. Because of the zero lower bound on interest rates, active interest rate rules are known to imply the existence of a second,...

Expectations play a central role in modern macroeconomics. The econometric learning approach, in line with the cognitive consistency principle, models agents as forming expectations by estimating and updating subjective forecasting models in real time. This approach provides a stability test for...

We study how the use of judgement or "add-factors" in macroeconomic forecasting may disturb the set of equilibrium outcomes when agents learn using recursive methods. We isolate conditions under which new phenomena, which we call exuberance equilibria, can exist in standard macroeconomic...