The zero lower bound (ZLB) constraint on interest rates makes speed limit policies (SLPs)---policies aimed at stabilizing the output growth---less effective. Away from the ZLB, the history dependence induced by a concern for output growth stabilization improves the inflation-output tradeoff for...

A number of prominent economists and policymakers have argued that money-financed fiscal programs (helicopter drops) could be efficacious in boosting output and inflation in economies facing persistent economic weakness, very low inflation, and significant fiscal strains. We employ a...

We investigate the implications of rule-of-thumb behaviour on the part of consumers or price setters for optimal monetary policy and simple interest rate rules. The existence of such behaviour leads to endogenous persistence in output and inflation; changes the transmission of shocks to these...

Appointing Rogoff's (1985) conservative central banker improves welfare if the economy is subject to large contractionary shocks and the policy rate occasionally falls to the zero lower bound (ZLB). In an economy with occasionally binding ZLB constraints, the anticipation of future ZLB episodes...

We study optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a New Keynesian model where occasional declines in agents' confidence give rise to persistent liquidity trap episodes. There is no straightforward recipe for enhancing welfare in this economy. Raising the inflation target or appointing an...

Since Kydland and Prescott (1977) and Barro and Gordon (1983), most studies of the problem of the inflation bias associated with discretionary monetary policy have assumed a quadratic loss function. We depart from the conventional linear-quadratic approach to the problem in favor of a projection...

In models of monetary policy, discretionary policymaking often lacks the ability to manage public beliefs, which explains the theoretical appeal of policy rules and commitment strategies. But as shown in this paper, when a policymaker possesses private information, belief management becomes an...

Modifying the objective function of a discretionary central bank to include an interest-rate smoothing objective increases the welfare of an economy in which large contractionary shocks occasionally force the central bank to lower the policy rate to its effective lower bound. The central bank...

I estimate a medium-scale New-Keynesian model and relax the conventional assumption that the central bank adopted an active monetary policy by pursuing inflation and output stability over the entire post-war period. Even after accounting for a rich structure, I find that monetary policy was...

The most common New-Keynesian model -- with sticky-prices -- has potentially implausible implications in a zero-lower bound environment. Fiscal and forward guidance multipliers can be implausibly large. Moreover, the sticky-price model implies that positive supply shocks, such as an increase in...