We study how changes in the steady-state real interest rate affect the optimal inflation target in a New Keynesian DSGE model with trend inflation and a lower bound on the nominal interest rate. In this setup, a lower steady-state real interest rate increases the probability of hitting the lower...

Central banks' announcements that future interest rates will remain low could signal either a weak future macroeconomic outlook - which is bad news - or a future expansionary monetary policy - which is good news. In this paper, we use the Survey of Professional Forecasters to show that these two...