This paper considers the optimal degree of discretion in monetary policy when the central bank conducts policy based on its private information about the state of the economy and is unable to commit. Society seeks to maximize social welfare by imposing restrictions on the central bank's actions...

We study a business cycle model in which a benevolent …scal authority must determine the optimal provision of government services, while lacking credibility, lump-sum taxes, and the ability to bond fi…nance de…ficits. Households and the fi…scal authority have risk sensitive pref- erences. We...

This paper studies the behavior of a central bank that seeks to conduct policy optimally while having imperfect credibility and harboring doubts about its model. Taking the Smets-Wouters model as the central banks approximating model, the papers main fi…ndings are as follows. First, a central...

Time-inconsistency is an essential feature of many policy problems (Kydland and Prescott, 1977). This paper presents and compares three methods for computing Markov-perfect opti- mal policies in stochastic nonlinear business cycle models. The methods considered include value function iteration,...

Discretionary policymakers cannot manage private-sector expectations and cannot coordinate the actions of future policymakers. As a consequence, expectations traps and coordination failures can occur and multiple equilibria can arise. To utilize the explanatory power of models with multiple...