Economic outcomes in dynamic economies with forward-looking agents depend crucially on whether or not the central bank can precommit, even in the absence of the traditional "inflation bias." This paper quantifies the welfare differential between precommitment and discretionary policy in both a...

This paper studies robust control problems when policy is set with commitment. One contribution of the paper is to articulate an approximating equilibrium that differs importantly from that developed in Hansen and Sargent (2003). The paper illustrates how the proposed approximating equilibrium...

This paper solves for optimal policy rules in a stylized small open economy model under a spectrum of targeting regimes. These policy reaction functions are presented as feedback rules highlighting the dominant state variables in each rule. Optimal simple rules - rules that exploit a reduced...

This paper presents techniques to solve for optimal simple monetary policy rules in rational expectations models, assuming discretion. The techniques described are notable for the flexibility they provide over the structure of the policy rule being solved for. Specifically, not all state...

This paper stresses that estimated policy rules are reduced form equations that are silent on many important policy questions. To obtain a structural understanding of monetary policy it is necessary to estimate the policymaker's objective function, rather than its policy reaction function. With...

This paper estimates two optimization-based sticky-price New Keynesian models and assesses how well they describe U.S. output, inflation, and interest rate dynamics. We consider models in which either internal habit formation influence consumption behavior, and in which Calvo-pricing and...

This paper estimates several popular sticky-price New Keynesian models in an effort to understand whether and under what circumstances these models can usefully describe observed outcomes. We estimate and compare specifications that contain different forms of habit formation, specifications that...

In this Economic Letter, we discuss the basic properties of hybrid New Keynesian models and examine the extent to which they successfully explain U.S. macroeconomic data.

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 Soderlind 2004). In this paper we show that the structural-form...

This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at a conference on "Fiscal and Monetary Policy" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on March 4 and 5, 2005.