This paper studies the relative performance of alternative monetary policy rules in the presence of oil price shocks in a small open economy optimizing model. Our analysis shows that it is important to distinguish between alternative price indices (CPI, core CPI, and GDP deflator) when modeling...

Real world monetary policy is complicated by long and variable lags in the transmission of the policy to the economy. Most of the policy models, however, abstracts from policy lags. This paper presents a model where transmission lags depend on the behaviour of a two-sector supply side of the...

I compare nominal GDP level targeting to flexible inflation targeting in a small New Keynesian model subject to the zero lower bound on nominal policy rates. First, I study the performance of optimal discretionary policies. I find that, for a standard calibration, inflation targeting under...

The paper derives the monetary policy reaction function implied by money growth targeting. It consists of an interest rate response to deviations of the inflation rate from target, to the change in the output gap, to money demand shocks and to the lagged interest rate. We show that this type of...

In this paper we use the Generalized Taylor Economy (GTE) framework in which there are many sectors with overlapping contracts of different lengths to analyze the design of monetary policy. We derive a utility based objective function of a central bank for this economy and use it to evaluate the...

We investigate the performance of forecast-based monetary policy rules using five macroeconomic models that reflect a wide range of views on aggregate dynamics. We identify the key characteristics of rules that are robust to model uncertainty: such rules respond to the one-year ahead inflation...

This paper examines a price-level target in a model with a forward-looking Calvo-Taylor Phillips curve. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is found that price-level targeting leads to a better trade-off between inflation and output-gap variability than inflation targeting, when the central bank...

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...

I evaluate the welfare performance of a target for the level of nominal GDP in a New Keynesian model with unemployment, accounting for a zero lower bound (ZLB) constraint on the nominal interest rate. Nominal GDP targeting is compared to employment targeting, a conventional Taylor rule, and the...