We wish to understand the implications of recent shifts in US productivity for the structure of optimal monetary policy rules. Accordingly, we augment a standard inflation targeting model in which a forward-looking version of the Taylor rule constitutes the optimal monetary policy with regime...

This paper examines the issue of the generation of optimal control policies where there are explicit constraints upon the control values and there is limited knowledge of the complex economic system. The paper develops a methodology where the constrained optimal control is based upon a learning...

In his monograph The Conquest of American Inflation, Sargent (1999) points out the perils of econometric policy evaluation of the Theil-Tinbergen tradition wherein one estimates a reduced form econometric model of the economy and subjects it to control. If the model is misspecified, as is...

In this paper, we show how to derive the spectra and cross-spectra of economic times series from an underlying econometric or VAR model. This allows us to conduct a proper frequency analysis of economic and financial variables on a reduced sample of data, without it being ruled out by large...

Recently, several countries have been considered the relative merits of "dollarization", that is, adopting the currency of an anchor country. One of the main potential costs of dollarization is that macroeconomic stability may be reduced by the loss of monetary policy autonomy. In this paper, we...

As recent research has shown one of the most important impediments to a successful conduct of monetary policy arises from the measurement error associated with output and inflation observations and the uncertainty regarding estimates of unobservables such as potential output. (See, for example,...