Many central banks have come to rely on dynamic stochastic general equilibrium, or DSGE, models to inform their economic outlook and to help formulate their policy strategies. But while their use is familiar to policymakers and academics, these models are typically not well known outside these...

This paper develops and estimates a macro-finance model that combines a canonical affine no-arbitrage finance specification of the term structure with standard macroeconomic aggregate relationships for output and inflation. From this new empirical formulation, we obtain several important...

Central banks pay close attention to inflation expectations. In standard models, however, inflation expectations are tied down by the assumption of rational expectations and should be of little independent interest to policy makers. In this paper, we relax the assumption of rational expectations...

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...

The literature on robust monetary policy rules has largely focused on the case in which the policymaker has a single reference model while the true economy lies within a specified neighborhood of the reference model. In this paper, we show that such rules may perform very poorly in the more...

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 develops a small forward-looking macroeconomic model where the Federal Reserve estimates the level of potential output in real time by running a regression on past output data. The Fed's perceived output gap is used as an input to the monetary policy rule while the true output gap...

Policy rules that are consistent with inflation targeting are examined in a small macroeconometric model of the US economy. We compare the properties and outcomes of explicit "instrument rules" as well as "targeting rules." The latter, which imply implicit instrument rules, may be closer to...

We use a version of the Fuhrer-Moore model to study the effects of expectations and central bank credibility on the economy's dynamic transition path during a disinflation. Simulations are compared under four different specifications of the model that vary according to the way that expectations...