We develop and estimate a stylized micro-founded model of the US economy. Next we compute the parameters of a simple interest rate policy rule that maximizes the unconditional mean of utility. We show that such a welfare-based rule lies close to the Taylor efficiency frontier. A counterfactual...

This paper re-examines the evolution of the US monetary transmission mechanism using an empirical framework that incorporates substantially more information than the standard tri-variate VAR model used in most previous studies. In particular, we employ an extended version of a factor-augmented...