This paper uses a small data-consistent model of the United States to identify and estimate the Federal Reserve's policy preferences. We find critical differences between the policy regimes in operation during the Burns-Miller and Volcker-Greenspan periods. Over the Volcker-Greenspan period we...

Economic outcomes in dynamic economies with forward-looking agents depend crucially on whether or not the central bank can precommit, even in the absence of the traditional "inflation bias." This paper quantifies the welfare differential between precommitment and discretionary policy in both a...

This paper takes the parameters in central bank loss functions as fundamental preferences to be estimated from the data. It is these preferences (along with target values) that define the policy regime in operation and that potentially change with senior central bank appointments. Optimizing...

Economic outcomes in dynamic economies with forward-looking agents depend crucially on whether or not the central bank can precommit, even in the absence of the traditional "inflation bias." This paper quantifies the welfare differential between precommitment and discretionary policy in both a...

This paper studies robust control problems when policy is set with commitment. One contribution of the paper is to articulate an approximating equilibrium that differs importantly from that developed in Hansen and Sargent (2003). The paper illustrates how the proposed approximating equilibrium...

This paper uses a small data-consistent model of the United States to identify and estimate the Federal Reserve's policy preferences. We find critical differences between the policy regimes in operation during the Burns-Miller and Volcker-Greenspan periods. Over the Volcker-Greenspan period we...

Woodford (1999) develops the notion of a "timelessly optimal" pre-commitment policy. This paper uses a simple business cycle model to illustrate this notion. We show that timelessly optimal policies are not unique and that they are not necessarily better than the time-consistent solution....

This paper stresses that estimated policy rules are reduced form equations that are silent on many important policy questions. To obtain a structural understanding of monetary policy it is necessary to estimate the policymaker's objective function, rather than its policy reaction function. With...

This paper develops algorithms that solve for optimal discretionary and optimal pre-commitment policies in rational-expectations models. The techniques developed are simpler to apply than existing methods; they do not require identifying and separating predetermined variables from jump...