There are striking and terrifying similarities between the sudden failure of a heart and that of a financial system. In the medical literature, the former is referred to as a sudden cardiac arrest (SCA). By analogy, I refer to its financial counterpart as a sudden financial arrest (SFA). In this...

This paper shows that a shift from Ramsey optimal policy under short term commitment (based on a negative-feedback mechanism) to a Taylor rule (based on positive-feedback mechanism) in the new-Keynesian model is in fact a Hopf bifurcation, with opposite policy advice. The number of stable...

Increasingly many central banks announce likely paths for future policy rates. Recent experience suggest that market forward rates can differ substantially from those announced. Models commonly adopted in policy analysis ignore such differences. This paper studies a simple model that can capture...

This paper provides an empirical assessment of the power of forward guidance at different horizons, shedding new light on the strength of the "forward guidance puzzle". Our identification strategy allows us to disentangle the change in future interest rates stemming from deviations from the...

Using US data, we estimate optimal policy with a probability below one that the Fed reneges on its commitment ("limited credibility") versus discretionary policy where the Fed reneges on its commitment at all periods with a probability equal to one ("zero credibility"). The transmission...

This paper compares different implementations of monetary policy in a new-Keynesian setting. We can show that a shift from Ramsey optimal policy under short-term commitment (based on a negative feedback mechanism) to a Taylor rule (based on a positive feedback mechanism) corresponds to a Hopf...

This paper updates the standard workhorse model of banks' reserve management to include frictions inherent to money markets. We apply the model to study monetary policy implementation through an operating regime involving voluntary reserve targets (VRT). When reserves are abundant, as is the...

Every monetary policy decision by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) is accompanied by a written statement about the state of the economy and the policy outlook, but only every second decision by a published interest rate forecast. We exploit this difference to study the relative influences...