Abstract In this paper, we test whether fiscal rules can act as a constraint on the ability of incumbent politicians to generate political business cycles using and monetary expansions, improve their re-election prospects. Using data for sample thirty-two African countries, fourteen which have budget balanced rule, our results show that stringent indeed dampen cycles. particular, find prior pre...

Giannoni and Woodford (2003a, 2003b) and Hansen and Sargent (2003, 2004) have recently developed different notions of robust policy, and both approaches have been applied in the context of optimal monetary policy. In this note, I demonstrate that both approaches lead to exactly the same implicit instrument rule for the policy maker in a standard, forward-looking, new Keynesian model. Despite th...

Following the damaging real effects of asset price fluctuations over the recent financial crisis, the debate on the appropriate role of such prices in a monetary policy context has gained renewed attention. This paper argues that a direct monetary policy response to asset prices is not desirable under common instrumental rate rules. To illustrate this point, we build an adaptive learning model,...

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The considerable amount of research in recent years on New Keynesian, open-economy models -models with nominal price rigidities and intertemporally maximizing agents -has yielded fresh insights for what Alan Blinder has called the “dark art” of making monetary policy. The literature has made its greatest contributions in understanding the transmission of shocks across countries, exchange rate p...

We consider optimal monetary stabilization policy in a New Keynesian model with explicit microfoundations, when the central bank recognizes that private-sector expectations need not be precisely model-consistent, and wishes to choose a policy that will be as good as possible in the case of any beliefs close enough to model-consistency. We show how to characterize robustly optimal policy without...

This paper considers the joint problem of model estimation and implementation of monetary policy in the face of uncertainty regarding the process of structural change in the economy. We model unobserved structural change through time variation in the natural rates of interest and unemployment. We show that certainty equivalent optimal policies perform poorly when there is model uncertainty abou...

In models with complete markets, targeting core inflation enables monetary policy to maximize welfare by replicating the flexible price equilibrium. We develop a two-sector new-Keynesian model to evaluate different inflation targeting rules in economies with financial frictions. We conclude that, in the presence of financial frictions, a welfaremaximizing central bank should adopt flexible head...

This paper characterizes the properties of various interest-rate rules in a basic forwardlooking model. We compare simple Taylor rules and rules that respond to price-level fluctuations (called Wicksellian rules). We argue that by introducing an appropriate amount of history dependence in policy, Wicksellian rules perform better than optimal Taylor rules in terms of welfare, robustness to alter...

in iran’s system of tripartite collective bargaining, does the wage-policy maker consistently react optimally to the best move made by the exchange rate-policy maker (nash-rule) or only to the state of economy (non-nash rule)?. this paper not only investigates the nature of the political game (nash rule against non-nash rule) but also estimates some structural parameters by using 2sls method an...