The welfare cost of random consumption fluctuations is known from De Santis (2007) to be increasing in the level of individual consumption risk in the economy. It is also known from Barillas et al. (2009) to increase if agents in the economy care about robustness to model misspecification. In...

In response to the Great Financial Crisis, the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England have adopted unconventional monetary policy instruments. We investigate if one of these, purchases of long-term government debt, could be a valuable addition to conventional short-term interest rate policy...

Disinflationary episodes are a valuable source of information for economic agents trying to learn about the economy. In this paper we are particularly interested in how policymakers can themselves learn by disinflating. The approach differs from the existing literature, which typically focuses...

In this paper we introduce identifying restrictions into a Markov-switching vector autoregression model. We define a separate set of impulse responses for each Markov regime to show how fundamental disturbances affect the variables in the model dependent on the regime. We go to illustrate the...

In this paper, we examine the incentives for central bank activism and caution in a two-country open-economy model with uncertainty and learning. We find that the presence of a strategic interaction between the home and foreign central banks creates an additional motivation for caution in...

This paper investigates the consequences of introducing endogenous price stickiness into a standard monetary policy model. We find that the modification reduces the optimal degree of inflation stabilization to which the central bank should commit. The reason is that less inflation stabilization...