Central banks behave purposefully when they set monetary policy, basing their decisions upon the data that is available and upon their understanding of the economy. At the same time, policy decisions affect economic outcomes, and the likelihood of observing a given state of the world. This paper...

This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on "Interest Rates and Monetary Policy" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on March 19 and 20, 2004, under the joint sponsorship of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Stanford Institute for...

This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on "Labor Markets and the Macroeconomy" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on March 3 and 4, 2006.

We use robust control techniques to study the effects of model uncertainty on monetary policy in an estimated, semi-structural, small-open-economy model of the U.K. Compared to the closed economy, the presence of an exchange rate channel for monetary policy not only produces new trade-offs for...

To conduct policy efficiently, central banks must use available data to infer, or learn, the relevant structural relationships in the economy. However, because a central bank's policy affects economic outcomes, the chosen policy may help or hinder its efforts to learn. This paper examines...

In this paper I show that discretionary policymaking can be superior to timeless perspective policymaking and identify model features that make this outcome more likely. Developing a measure of conditional loss that treats the auxiliary state variables that characterize the timeless perspective...

The Calvo pricing model that lies at the heart of many New Keynesian business cycle models has been roundly criticized for being inconsistent both with time series data on inflation and with micro-data on the frequency of price changes. In this paper we show that a modified version of the Gali...

Robust control allows policymakers to formulate policies that guard against model misspecification. The principal tools used to solve robust control problems are state-space methods (see Hansen and Sargent, 2006, and Giordani and Söderlind, 2004). In this paper we show that the structural-form...

The monetary policy literature assumes increasingly that policy is formulated according to the timeless perspective (Woodford, 1999a). However, by treating appropriately the auxiliary state variables that characterize the timeless perspective equilibrium when evaluating policy performance, this...