When a policymaker is better informed than the public, public beliefs about the hidden informationemerge as additional state variables, managed by the policymaker. General methodsare presented to compute optimal commitment and discretion policies.Under commitment, policy is additive in two...

Monetary policy is most effective when public beliefs about future policies are activelymanaged. This is the appeal of policy rules and commitment strategies, typically absent underdiscretion. But when a policymaker has some private information — as is the case in reality— belief management...

This paper proposes a new procedure for shock identification of macroeconomic forecasts based on factor analysis. Our identification scheme for information shocks relies on data reduction techniques for daily panels and the recognition that macroeconomic releases exhibit a high level of...

Monetary policy is most effective when public beliefs about future policies are actively managed. This is the appeal of policy rules and commitment strategies, typically absent under discretion. But when a policymaker has some private information - as is the case in reality - belief management...

The recent economic crisis gave proof of the fact that the Taylor rule is no more that good instrument as it was thought to be just ten years ago; this might be due to the fact that agents acting in the economy hold Heterogeneous Expectations (HE). In a recent paper Anufriev et al. (2013)...

We estimate monetary policy rules in Switzerland for 1981-1997. In addition to an inflation gap, we find that forward-looking rules with output and exchange rate gaps nicely fit monetary aggregates as well as the call rate. We split the sample in 1990 when the Swiss National Bank replaced annual...

As projections have inflation heading back toward target and the labor market continuing to improve, the Federal Reserve has begun to contemplate an increase in the federal funds rate. There is however substantial uncertainty around these projections. How should this uncertainty affect monetary...

Global growth prospects have deteriorated significantly since the beginning of the year, raising the specter of global recession. This paper relies on insights gleaned from previous global recessions to analyze the recent evolution of economic activity and policies and presents plausible...

This paper develops a set of leading indicators of industrial production growth and consumer price inflation for the period 2001-2010. The choice of indicators is based on pseudo out-of-sample forecasting exercise implemented by Stock and Watson (2003), amongst others. We find that asset prices...