Literature on monetary policy can be broadly classified into two categories. The first category involves the construction of dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium models for monetary policy. The solid micro foundations built into these models are important because they facilitate interpretation...

Recently, increasing attention is being devoted to interest rate rules that respond directly to economic forecasts rather than relying on current and past observations. Empirical studies suggest this 'forward-looking' rule provides a reasonable description of recent monetary policy in several...

We formulate an optimizing-agent model in which both labor and product markets exhibit monopolistic competition and staggered nominal contracts. We demonstrate that the household's unconditional expected utility can be expressed in terms of the unconditional variances of the outgap gap,...

Over the past decade there has been remarkable progress in developing empirical micro-founded macroeconomic models for monetary policy analysis that feature coherence both to economic theory and to the data. In this paper, we estimate using Bayesian methods a second-generation micro founded...

We present an algorithm and software routines for computing nth-order approximate solutions to dynamic, discrete-time rational expectations models around a nonstochastic steady state. We apply these routines to investigate the optimal monetary policy with commitment in an optimizing-agent model...

We formulate a generalized price-setting framework that incorporates staggered contracts of multiple durations and that enables us to directly identify the influences of nominal vs. real rigidities. Using German macroeconomic data over the period 1975Q1 through 1998Q4 to estimate this framework,...

We analyze a new panel data set that includes balance sheet information, measures of expected default risk, and credit spreads on publicly-traded debt for more than 900 firms over the period 1997Q1 through 2003Q3. We obtain precise time-specific estimates of the financial frictions parameter...

We compute the optimal Ramsey policy in a New Keynesian model where the steady state suffers from monopolistic and tax distortions. We show that the optimal monetary policy in this environment displays asymmetric responses to shocks to optimally inflate the economy (slightly) at times when it...

In this paper, we investigate the welfare implications of alternative financial market structures in a two-country endowment economy model. In particular, we obtain an analytic expression for the expected lifetime utility of the representative household when sovereign bonds are the only...