Although policymakers and commentators have repeatedly stressed the impact of uncertainty about the true state of the economy on the setting of interest rates, the academic literature has largely ignored this issue. This paper provides a theoretical analysis of how uncertainty about the true...

The Opportunistic Approach to Monetary Policy is an influential but untested model of optimal monetary policy. We provide the first tests of the model, using US data from 1983Q1-2004Q1. Our results support the Opportunistic Approach. We find that policymakers respond to the gap between inflation...

We estimate a flexible non-linear monetary policy rule for the UK to examine the response of policymakers to the real exchange rate. We have three main findings. First, policymakers respond to real exchange rate misalignment rather than to the real exchange rate itself. Second, policymakers...

This paper analyses the impact of uncertainty on monetary policy rules in the US since the early 1980s. Extending the Taylor rule to allow the response of interest rates to inflation and the output gap to depend on uncertainty, we find evidence that the predictions of the theoretical literature...

This paper developes a theoretical model to analyse the impact of uncertainty about the true state of the economy on monetary policy. The theoretical model is tested on US data since the early 1980s. Our estimates suggest that the effect of uncertainty on interest rates was most marked in 1983,...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the response of monetary policymakers to uncertainty. Using data for the UK since the introduction of inflation targets in October 1992, we find that the impact of inflation on interest rates is lower when inflation is more uncertain and is larger when...

This paper argues that the linear price- dividend relationship as predicted in the Gordon (1962) model breaks down in regimes of high inflation and deflation. Using data for the US and the UK over the period from 1871 to 2002, nonlinear estimates support the prediction of the model.

Using UK data over the 1973q1-2004q1 period, we find that the dynamics of the real exchange rate, real wages and unemployment vary both with large versus small real exchange rate disequilibria and rising versus falling unemployment regimes. The short-run real exchange rate adjusts only when...

We apply non-linear error-correction models to the analysis of fiscal policy. Our empirical analysis, based on Italy, shows that the burden of correcting budgetary disequilibria is entirely carried by changes in taxes, rather than changes in government spending or policy mixes. On the other...

This paper explores the ability of common risk factors to predict the dynamics of US and UK interest rate swap spreads within a linear and a non-linear framework. We reject linearity for the US and UK swap spreads in favour of a regime-switching smooth transition vector autoregressive (STVAR)...