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...

I analyze the effects of a favorable shift in expected future productivity on the current level of investment and the real interest rate. In a standard RBC model, an increase in expected future productivity raises the real rate, but decreases the current level of investment for plausible...