Taylor Rules and Interest Rate Smoothing in the US and EMU

In this paper we estimate simple Taylor rules paying a particular attention to interest rate smoothing. Following English, Nelson, and Sack (2002), we employ a model in first differences to gain some insights on the presence and significance of the degree of partial ad- justment. Moreover, we estimate a nested model to take both interest rate smoothing and serially correlated deviations from various Taylor rate prescriptions into account. Our findings suggest that the lagged interest rate enters the Taylor rule in its own right, and may very well coexist with a serially correlated policy shock. Asymmetric preferences on the output gap level and financial indicators turn out to be impor- tant factors to understand Greenspan’s policy conduct. By contrast, our findings support standard regressors for the ’European’ Taylor rule.