This paper investigates the implications of noisy information regarding the measurement of economic activity for the evaluation of monetary policy. A common implicit assumption in such evaluations is that policymakers observe the current state of the economy promptly and accurately and can therefore adjust policy based on this information. However, in reality, decisions are made in real time when there is considerable uncertainty about the true state of affairs in the economy. Policy must be made with partial information. Using a simple model of the U.S. economy, I show that failing to account for the actual level of information noise in the historical data provides a seriously distorted picture of feasible macroeconomic outcomes and produces inefficient policy rules. Naive adoption of policies identified as efficient when such information noise is ignored results in macroeconomic performance worse than actual experience. When the noise content of the data is properly taken into account, policy reactions are cautious and less sensitive to the apparent imbalances in the unfiltered data. The resulting policy prescriptions reflect the recognition that excessively activist policy can increase rather than decrease economic instability.

I develop a general equilibrium model with sticky prices, credit constraints, nominal loans and asset prices. Changes in asset prices modify agents ’ borrowing capacity through collateral value; changes in nominal prices affect real repayments through debt deflation. Monetary policy shocks move asset and nominal prices in the same direction, and are amplified and propagated over time. The “financial accelerator ” is not constant across shocks: nominal debt stabilises supply shocks, making the economy less volatile when the central bank controls the interest rate. I discuss the role of equity, debt indexation and household and firm leverage in the propagation mechanism. Finally, I find that monetary policy should not target asset prices as a means of reducing output and inflation volatility. “The population is not distributed between debtors and creditors randomly. Debtors have borrowed for good reasons, most of which indicate a high marginal propensity to spend from wealth or from current income or from any other liquid resources they can command. Typically their indebtedness is rationed by lenders [...] Business borrowers typically have a strong propensity to hold physical capital, producers ’ durable goods. Their desired portfolios contain more capital than their net worth — they like to take risks with other people’s money. Household debtors are frequently young families acquiring homes and furnishings before they earn incomes to pay for them outright; given the difficulty of borrowing against future wages, they are liquidity-constrained and have a high marginal propensity to consume ” (James Tobin, “Asset Accumulation and Economic Activity”, 1980)

It is argued that inflation targeting is best understood as a commitment to a targeting rule rather than an instrument rule, eitherageneral targeting rule (explicit objectives for monetary policy) or a specific targeting rule (a criterion for (the forecasts of) the target variables to be fulfilled), essentially the equality of the marginal rates of transformation and substitution between the target variables. Targeting rules allow the use of judgment and extramodel information, are more robust and easier to verify than optimal instrument rules, and they can nevertheless bring the economy close to the socially optimal equilibrium.

The central puzzle in international business cycles is that real exchange rates are volatile and persistent. The most popular story for real exchange rate fluctuations is that they are generated by monetary shocks interacting with sticky goods prices. We quantify this story and find that it can account for some of the observed properties of real exchange rates. When prices are held fixed for at least one year, risk aversion is high and preferences are separable in leisure, the model generates real exchange rates that are as volatile as in the data. The model also generates real exchange rates that are persistent, but less so than in the data. If monetary shocks are correlated across countries, then the comovements in aggregates across countries are broadly consistent with those in the data. Making asset markets incomplete or introducing sticky wages does not measurably change the results.

Despite powerful advances in yield curve modeling in the last twenty years, comparatively little attention has been paid to the key practical problem of forecasting the yield curve. In this paper we do so. We use neither the no-arbitrage approach, which focuses on accurately fitting the cross section of interest rates at any given time but neglects time-series dynamics, nor the equilibrium approach, which focuses on time-series dynamics (primarily those of the instantaneous rate) but pays comparatively little attention to fitting the entire cross section at any given time and has been shown to forecast poorly. Instead, we use variations on the Nelson-Siegel exponential components framework to model the entire yield curve, period-by-period, as a three-dimensional parameter evolving dynamically. We show that the three time-varying parameters may be interpreted as factors corresponding to level, slope and curvature, and that they may be estimated with high efficiency. We propose and estimate autoregressive models for the factors, and we show that our models are consistent with a variety of stylized facts regarding the yield curve. We use our models to produce term-structure forecasts at both short and long horizons, with encouraging results. In particular, our forecasts appear much more accurate at long horizons than various standard benchmark forecasts. Finally, we discuss a number of extensions, including generalized duration measures, applications to active bond portfolio management, and arbitrage-free specifications. Acknowledgments: The National Science Foundation and the Wharton Financial Institutions Center provided research support. For helpful comments we are grateful to Dave Backus, Rob Bliss, Michael Brandt, Todd Clark, Qiang Dai, Ron Gallant, Mike Gibbons, Da...

This paper examines the implications of recent research on monetary policy rules for practical monetary policy making, with special emphasis on strategies for setting interest rates by the European Central Bank (ECB). The paper draws on recent research and new simulations of a large open economy model to assess the efficiency of a simple benchmark rule in comparison with other proposed rules. The paper stresses new results on the robustness of monetary policy rules in which each rule that is optimal or good according to one model or researcher is tested for robustness by other researchers using different models. Because of the large increase in the number of economists focussing on econometric evaluation of monetary policy rules for the interest rate instrument and because of the parallel increase in the variety of models being developed for this purpose, much more evidence is becoming available on the robustness of simple monetary policy rules for the interest rate than ever before.

Using a new dataset consisting of six years of real-time exchange rate quotations, macroeconomic expectations, and macroeconomic realizations (announcements), we characterize the conditional means of U.S. dollar spot exchange rates versus German Mark, British Pound, Japanese Yen, Swiss Franc, and the Euro. In particular, we find that announcement surprises (that is, divergences between expectations and realizations, or "news") produce conditional mean jumps; hence high-frequency exchange rate dynamics are linked to fundamentals. The details of the linkage are intriguing and include announcement timing and sign effects. The sign effect refers to the fact that the market reacts to news in an asymmetric fashion: bad news has greater impact than good news, which we relate to recent theoretical work on information processing and price discovery. Key Words: Exchange Rates; Macroeconomic News Announcements; Jumps; Market Microstructure; High-Frequency Data; Expectations Data; Anticipations Data; Order Flow; Asset Return Volatility; Forecasting.

This paper employs stochastic simulations of a small structural rational expectations model to investigate the consequences of the zero bound on nominal interest rates. We find that if the economy is subject to stochastic shocks similar in magnitude to those experienced in the U.S. over the 1980s and 1990s, the consequences of the zero bound are negligible for target inflation rates as low as 2 percent. However, the effects of the constraint are non-linear with respect to the inflation target and produce a quantitatively significant deterioration of the performance of the economy with targets between 0 and 1 percent. The variability of output increases significantly and that of inflation also rises somewhat. The stationary distribution of output is distorted with recessions becoming somewhat more frequent and longer lasting. Our model also uncovers that the asymmetry of the policy ineffectiveness induced by the zero bound generates a non-vertical long-run Phillips curve. Output falls increasingly short of potential with lower inflation targets. At zero average inflation, the output loss is in the order of 0.1 percentage points. We also investigate the consequences of the constraint on the analysis of optimal policy based on the inflation-output variability frontier. We demonstrate that in the presence of the zero bound, the variability frontier is distorted as the inflation target approaches zero. As a result comparisons of alternative policy rules that ignore the zero bound can be seriously misleading.

It is a pleasure to be asked to comment upon Lars Svensson’s thoughtful and ambitious paper, though it raises far too many issues for me to attempt to address them all in the limited time available here. Svensson offers a thorough review of the recent scholarly literature on the conduct of monetary policy, and also reviews one of the most important recent developments in central bank practice as well, namely the evolving methodology of “inflation forecast targeting.” In my own remarks, I would like to develop further a single theme, which is the advantage of central bank commitment to a systematic approach to monetary policy. This theme also figures in Svensson’s discussion, but I believe that its consequences extend even further than he indicates.

We lay out a small open economy version of the Calvo sticky price model, and show how the equilibrium dynamics can be reduced to a tractable canonical system in domestic inflation and the output gap. We employ this framework to analyze the macroeconomic implications of three alternative rule-based policy regimes for the small open economy: domestic inflation and CPI-based Taylor rules, and an exchange rate peg. We show that a key difference among these regimes lies in the relative amount of exchange rate volatility that they entail. We also discuss a special case for which domestic inflation targeting constitutes the optimal policy, and where a simple second order approximation to the utility of the representative consumer can be derived and used to evaluate the welfare losses associated with those suboptimal rules.