We argue that in seeking to insure against model uncertainty, monetary policy makers are often ready to trade ex-post performance for greater certainty in the outcome. They thus look for rules that although not optimal ex post, have certain properties that qualify them as robust. We apply first,...

Conventional wisdom says that commitment eliminates the inflationary bias of monetary policy. However, this paper shows that the inflation bias can persist even when the central bank commits. A simple model is presented in which the central bank precommits by setting the policy instrument, and...

Central banks face uncertainty about the true location of the effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates. We model optimal discretionary monetary policy during a liquidity trap when the central bank designs policy that is robust with respect to the location of the ELB. If the central...

Model uncertainty has the potential to change importantly how monetary policy should be conducted, making it an issue that central banks cannot ignore. In this paper, I use a standard new Keynesian business cycle model to analyze the behavior of a central bank that conducts policy with...

This paper offers a Bayesian decision-theoretic approach to policy evaluation in rational expectation models. First, we show how to correctly assess and rank simple policy rules under the welfare loss minimization criterion in the presence of uncertainty about the model’s structural...

This paper provides original empirical evidence on the emerging practice by central banks of communicating uncertainty in their inflation projections. We compare the effects of point and density projections in a learning-to-forecast laboratory experiment where participants' aggregated...

In 1994 the Federal Reserve System moved to a more transparent reporting of monetary policy. In this paper we first discuss the various sources of uncertainty that play an essential role in the formulation and conduct of monetary policy and evaluate the degree of uncertainty faced by monetary...

There is a considerable academic literature on the relationship between Central Bank independence and inflation but the issue of Central Bank accountability and its effect of inflation performance has received very little attention. This paper looks at the issue of accountability in a simple...