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...

During the Great Recession, the government provided large fiscal stimulus in an economic environment characterized by a high degree of uncertainty on the future course of the economy while the nominal interest rate was constrained at the zero lower bound. While many papers have analyzed the...

This paper characterizes optimal government spending when monetary policy is constrained by the zero lower bound under a variety of assumptions about a set of fiscal instruments available to finance government spending. The private sector of the model is given by a standard New Keynesian model....

This paper studies credible policies in a New Keynesian economy in which the nominal interest rate is subject to the ZLB constraint and contractionary shocks hit the economy occasionally. The Ramsey policy involves keeping the policy rate low even after the shock disappears, but the central bank...

The presence of the lagged shadow policy rate in the interest rate feedback rule reduces the government spending multiplier nontrivially when the policy rate is constrained at the zero lower bound (ZLB). In the economy with policy inertia, increased inflation and output due to higher government...

Can the central bank credibly commit to keeping the nominal interest rate low for an extended period of time in the aftermath of a deep recession? By analyzing credible plans in a sticky-price economy with occasionally binding zero lower bound constraints, I find that the answer is yes if...

This paper examines how the presence of uncertainty alters allocations and prices when the nominal interest rate is constrained by the zero lower bound. I conduct the analysis using a standard New Keynesian model in which the nominal interest rate is determined according to a truncated Taylor...

There exists an extensive literature estimating idiosyncratic labor income processes. While a wide variety of models are estimated, GMM estimators are almost always used. We examine the validity of using likelihood based estimation in this context by comparing the small sample properties of a...

Can the central bank credibly commit to keeping the nominal interest rate low for an extended period of time in the aftermath of a deep recession? By analyzing credible plans in a sticky-price economy with occasionally binding zero lower bound constraints, I find that the answer is yes if...

This paper studies the welfare consequences of exogenous variations in trend inflation in a New Keynesian economy. Consumption and leisure respond asymmetrically to a rise and a decline in trend inflation. As a result, an increase in the variance of shocks to the trend inflation process...