We determine optimal monetary policy under commitment in a forwardlooking New Keynesian model when nominal interest rates are bounded below by zero. The lower bound represents an occasionally binding constraint that causes the model and optimal policy to be nonlinear. A calibration to the U.S....

We determine optimal discretionary monetary policy in a New-Keynesian model when nominal interest rates are bounded below by zero. Nominal interest rates should be lowered faster in response to adverse shocks than in the case without bound. Such ‘preemptive easing’ is optimal because...

We study optimal nominal demand policy in an economy with monopolistic competition and flexible prices when firms have imperfect common knowledge about the shocks hitting the economy. Parametrizing firms' information imperfections by a (Shannon) capacity parameter that constrains the amount of...

We estimate a forward-looking New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) for the U.S. using data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters as proxy for expected inflation. We obtain significant and plausible estimates for the structural parameters of the NKPC (the discount factor and the share of...

We consider optimal monetary stabilization policy in a New Keynesian model with explicit microfoundations, when the central bank recognizes that private-sector expectations need not be precisely model-consistent, and wishes to choose a policy that will be as good as possible in the case of any...

We study a standard consumption based asset pricing model with rational investors who entertain subjective prior beliefs about price behavior. Optimal behavior then dictates that investors learn about price behavior from past price observations. We show that this imparts momentum and mean...

When is it optimal for a government to default on its legal repayment oblig- ations? We answer this question for a small open economy with domestic production risk in which the government optimally finances itself by issuing non-contingent debt. We show that Ramsey optimal policies occasionally...

We document the presence of sizable distributional effects from unexpected price level movements in the Euro Area (EA) using sectoral accounts and newly available data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey. The EA as a whole is a net winner of unexpected price level increases, with...

The booms and busts in U.S. stock prices over the post-war period can to a large extent be explained by fluctuations in investors' subjective capital gains expectations. Survey measures of these expectations display excessive optimism at market peaks and excessive pessimism at market throughs....

We present a stock market model that quantitatively replicates the joint behavior of stock prices, trading volume and investor expectations. Stock prices in the model occasionally display belief-driven boom and bust cycles that delink asset prices from fundamentals and redistribute considerable...