The literature on robust monetary policy rules has largely focused on the case in which the policymaker has a single reference model while the true economy lies within a specified neighborhood of the reference model. In this paper, we show that such rules may perform very poorly in the more...

This paper uses a small data-consistent model of the United States to identify and estimate the Federal Reserve's policy preferences. We find critical differences between the policy regimes in operation during the Burns-Miller and Volcker-Greenspan periods. Over the Volcker-Greenspan period we...

We examine the performance and robustness of monetary policy rules when the central bank and the public have imperfect knowledge of the economy and continuously update their estimates of model parameters. We find that versions of the Taylor rule calibrated to perform well under rational...

Using a short-term interest rate as the monetary policy instrument can be problematic near its zero bound constraint. An alternative strategy is to use a long-term interest rate as the policy instrument. We find when Taylor-type policy rules are used to set the long rate in a standard New...

We examine the performance and robustness properties of alternative monetary policy rules in the presence of structural change that renders the natural rates of interest and unemployment uncertain. Using a forward-looking quarterly model of the U.S. economy, estimated over the 1969-2002 period,...

Woodford (1999) develops the notion of a "timelessly optimal" pre-commitment policy. This paper uses a simple business cycle model to illustrate this notion. We show that timelessly optimal policies are not unique and that they are not necessarily better than the time-consistent solution....

This paper stresses that estimated policy rules are reduced form equations that are silent on many important policy questions. To obtain a structural understanding of monetary policy it is necessary to estimate the policymaker's objective function, rather than its policy reaction function. With...

This paper considers the monetary policymaker’s joint problem of model estimation and the design of a policy rule in the face of uncertainty regarding the process of structural change in the economy. Unobserved structural change is modeled through time variation in the natural rates of...

This paper develops algorithms that solve for optimal discretionary and optimal pre-commitment policies in rational-expectations models. The techniques developed are simpler to apply than existing methods; they do not require identifying and separating predetermined variables from jump...

We develop an estimated model of the U.S. economy in which agents form expectations by continually updating their beliefs regarding the behavior of the economy and monetary policy. We explore the effects of policymakers' misperceptions of the natural rate of unemployment during the late 1960s...