This paper analyzes optimal monetary policy under precommitment in a state-dependent pricing (SDP) environment. Under SDP, monopolistically competitive firms are allowed to endogenously change the timing of price adjustments. I show that this endogenous timing of price adjustment alters the...

Both interest rates and inflation rates in the Euro area have reached levels dangerously close to zero. By the strategy of quantitative easing the ECB has been providing ample liquidity – yet without lasting success. Several asymmetries in policy transmission and monetary policy making have...

Empirical data suggest that new firms tend to grow faster than incumbent firms in terms of their productivity. A sticky-price model with learning-by-doing in new firms fits this data and predicts that for plausible calibrations, the optimal long-run inflation rate is positive and between 0.5%...

This paper analyses the major changes in both monetary and fiscal policy that have taken place over the past two decades and, within the limits of the existing empirical research, evaluates the overall costs and benefits for the OECD economies. The general findings for monetary policy are that,...

This paper studies monetary policy rules in a small open economy with Inflation Targeting, incomplete pass-through and rigid nominal wages. The paper shows that, when nominal wages are fully flexible and pass-through is low to moderate, the monetary authority should target the consumer price...

In closed or open economy models with complete markets, targeting core inflation enables monetary policy to maximize welfare by replicating the flexible price equilibrium. We analyze this result in the context of developing economies, where a large proportion of households are credit constrained...

Assigning a discretionary central bank a mandate to stabilize an average in ation rate| rather than a period-by-period in ation rate|increases welfare in a New Keynesian model with an occasionally binding lower bound on nominal interest rates. Under rational expecta- tions, the...

The uniqueness of bounded local equilibria under interest rate rules is analyzed in a model with sticky information `a la Mankiw and Reis (2002). The main results are tighter bounds on monetary policy than in sticky-price models, irrelevance of the degree of output-gap targeting for determinacy,...