Assessing Monetary Rules Performance across EMU Countries

The topic covered in this paper is the performance of different monetary policy rules thought to be used as a guideline in practical policymaking. In this respect, different rules are estimated using alternative econometrics techniques. A comparative analysis based on the ability of the rules in capturing the historical central banks' behaviour and on the volatility on the output, inflation and interest rate changes that they imply is performed. The study is conducted on the EMU countries. The results suggest that the simple rules perform quite well and that the gains obtained from adopting an optimal control-based rule are not so large. Moreover the addition of a forward-looking dimension and of an interest rate smoothing term in the reaction function seems to improve the performance of the rules.