This paper studies a monetary model that is standard in all respects except that market participants have incomplete knowledge about the economic structure and employ adaptive learning rules to learn about the economic environment. Market participants also must contend with unannounced regime shifts. Simulation results suggest that the models under adaptive learning, especially constant-gain le...

Negotiations among nations on policies to promote international economic integration have widened in recent years to cover new issues; for example, foreign direct investment rules, policies to promote competition, the international movement of labor, the environment and monetary union. In these negotiations, a consensus among the parties negotiating is usually lacking and many of these negotiat...

Are the recessionary consequences of oil-price shocks due to oil-price shocks themselves or to contractionary monetary policies that arise in response to inflation concerns engendered by rising oil prices? Can systematic monetary policy be used to alleviate the consequences of oil shocks on the economy? This paper builds a dynamic general equilibrium model of monopolistic competition in which o...

This paper shows that the optimal monetary policies recommended by New Keynesian models still imply a large amount of inflation risk. We calculate the term structure of inflation uncertainty in New Keynesian models when the monetary authority adopts the optimal policy. When the monetary policy rules are modified to include some weight on a price path, the economy achieves equilibria with substa...

Although the IS/LM-AS/AD model is still the central tool of macroeconomic teaching in most macroeconomic textbooks, it has been criticized by several economists. Colander (1995) demonstrated that the framework is logically inconsistent, Romer (2000) showed that it is unable to deal with a monetary policy that uses the interest rate as its operating target, and Walsh criticized that it is not we...

This paper explores the similarity of the underlying economic problems that lead to the establishment of (a) independent central banks to operate national monetary policies and (b) independent regulatory agencies for telecommunications and other utility service industries. We show that, in both cases, the adoption of agencies independent of government results from the need to achieve credibilit...

An important theme in the writings of Jess Benhabib is the global stability of equilibrium in monetary economies. A key result emerging from his research is that Taylor-type interest rate feedback rules that are bounded below by zero can lead to unintended liquidity traps. The present paper shows that even if the interest rate rule is not bounded below by zero, that is, even if the government c...

This article aims to study the determinants of macroeconomic inertia in the euro area. To this end, it estimates a simple monetary DSGE model with private-sector learning, but which also includes more structural sources of inertia, such as habit formation in consumption and inflation indexation. Economic agents are assumed to form nearrational expectations and to learn the model parameters over...

FREQUENTLY CITED THEORETICAL framework for the conduct of monetary policy consists of a policy instrument, an intermediate policy target and a long-run policy objective. The policy instrument is a lever which the central bank can manipulate to achieve its intermediate target. Possible choices for the policy instrument include the quantity of bank reserves, the monetary base (hank reserves plus ...

Commitment in monetary policy leads to equilibria that are superior to those from optimal discretionary policies. A number of interest rate reaction functions and instrument rules have been proposed to implement or approximate commitment policy. We assess these optimal reaction functions and instrument rules in terms of whether they lead to an RE equilibrium that is both locally determinate and...