This paper shows the inappropriatedness of approximation procedures for welfare rankings across suboptimal policy strategies. On the grounds of a simple general equilibrium model, we find that even commonly accepted techniques are not suitable to achieve accurate welfare orderings. This result...

This paper studies the welfare consequences of exogenous variations in trend inflation in a New Keynesian economy. Consumption and leisure respond asymmetrically to a rise and a decline in trend inflation. As a result, an increase in the variance of shocks to the trend inflation process...

This paper studies the effect on monetary policy of a non-homogeneous degree of competition across the (two) members of a monetary union. In particular, we assess the welfare loss brought about by the use of a simple interest rate rule that does not take into account such structural differences....

This paper compares the welfare implications of two widely used pricing assumptions in the New-Keynesian literature: Calvo-pricing vs. Rotemberg-pricing. We show that despite the strong similarities between the two assumptions to a first order of approximation, in general they might entail...

We compute the optimal Ramsey policy in a New Keynesian model where the steady state suffers from monopolistic and tax distortions. We show that the optimal monetary policy in this environment displays asymmetric responses to shocks to optimally inflate the economy (slightly) at times when it...

The problem of classifying a new observation vector into one of the two known groups distributed as multivariate normal with common covariance matrix is considered. In this paper, we handle the situation that the dimension, p, of the observation vectors is less than the total number, N, of...