The liquidity trap is synonymous with ineffective monetary policy. The common wisdom is that, as the short-term interest rate nears its effective lower bound, monetary policy cannot do much to stimulate the economy. However, central banks have resorted to alternative instruments, such as QE,...

I develop a model that explicitly takes the role of financial institutions in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy into account. Within this model, I find various equilibrium environments, with one of them resembling a standard environment for monetary policy and another one akin to a...

Assigning a discretionary central bank a mandate to stabilize an average in ation rate| rather than a period-by-period in ation rate|increases welfare in a New Keynesian model with an occasionally binding lower bound on nominal interest rates. Under rational expecta- tions, the...