A long-standing issue in the theory of monetary policy is that the same path for the interest rate can be associated with multiple bounded equilibrium paths for inflation and output. We show that a small friction in memory and intertemporal coordination can remove this indeterminacy. This leaves...

Should a policymaker manage expectations by offering forward guidance in terms of the likely value of a future policy instrument or a target for an equilibrium outcome such as aggregate output? We study how the optimal approach depends on plausible bounds on agents' depth of knowledge and...

This paper examines the ability of a policy maker to control equilibrium outcomes in an environment where market participants play a coordination game with information heterogeneity. We consider defense policies against speculative currency attacks in a model where speculators observe the...

How does the economy respond to news about future policies or future fundamentals? Standard practice assumes that agents have common knowledge of such news and face no uncertainty about how others will respond. Relaxing this assumption attenuates the general-equilibrium effects of news and...

This paper studies optimal policy in a business-cycle setting in which firms have a blurry understanding of the state of the economy due to informational or cognitive constraints. The latter are not only the source of nominal rigidity but also an impediment in the coordination of production. The...

This paper studies how the creation of a European Central Bank (ECB) will change the political economy of monetary policy in Europe. The twelve governors of the national Central Banks of the EEC have recently proposed a statute for the ECB which delineates its institutional structure. In this...

We study optimal monetary policy in an environment in which firms' pricing and production decisions are subject to informational frictions. Our framework accommodates multiple formalizations of these frictions, including dispersed private information, sticky information, and certain forms of...