This paper characterizes jointly optimal default and exchange-rate policy in a small open economy with limited enforcement of debt contracts and downward nominal wage rigidity. Under optimal policy, default occurs during contractions and is accompanied by large devaluations. The latter inflate...

This paper shows that monetary policy should be delegated to a central bank that cross-checks optimal policy with information from the Taylor rule. Attaching some weight to deviations of the interest rate from the interest rate prescribed by the Taylor rule is beneficial if the central bank aims...

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...

Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models featuring imperfect competition and nominal rigidities have become central for the analysis of the monetary transmission mechanism and for understanding the conduct of monetary policy. However, it is agreed that the benchmark model fails to generate...

This paper presents a Generalized Method of Moments algorithm for estimating the structural parameters of a macroeconomic model subject to the restriction that the coefficients of the monetary policy rule minimize the central bank's expected loss function. The algorithm combines least-squares...

This paper addresses two important questions that have, so far, been studied separately in the literature. First, the paper aims at explaining the high volatility of long-term interest rates observed in the data, which is hard to replicate using standard macro models. Building a small-scale...

A small open macroeconomic model, in which an optimal interest rate rule emerges to drive the inflation behavior, is used to model inflation within an inflation targeting framework. This set up is used to estimate the relationship between commodity prices shocks and the inflation process in a...

We highlight how detrending within Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVAR) is directly linked to the shock identification. Consequences of trend misspecification are investigated using a prototypical Real Business Cycle model as the Data Generating Process. Decomposing the different sources of...

This article considers recent literature on optimal monetary policy in simple open-economy models. The presence of pricing to market, incomplete financial markets, and differences in preferences among households (in different countries) introduces some fundamental differences between closed- and...

This paper introduces financial market frictions into a standard New Keynesian model through search and matching in the credit market. Under such financial mar- ket frictions, a second-order approximation of social welfare includes a term involv- ing credit, in addition to terms for inflation...