Since central banks have limited information concerning the transmission channel of monetary policy, they are faced with the difficult task of simultaneously controlling the policy target and estimating the impact of policy actions. A tradeoff between estimation and control arises because policy...

We analyze the effects of social learning in a widely-studied monetary policy context. Social learning might be viewed as more descriptive of actual learning behavior in complex market economies. Ideas about how best to forecast the economy's state vector are initially heterogeneous. Agents can...

In this paper we extend the analysis of optimal monetary policy rules in terms of stability of an economy, started by Evans and Honkapohja (2003b), to the case of heterogeneous private agents learning. Following Giannitsarou (2003), we pose the question about the applicability of the...

This paper analyzes how the formation of expectations constrains monetary and fiscal policy design. Economic agents have imperfect knowledge about the economic environment and the policy regime in place. Households and firms learn about the policy regime using historical data. Regime uncertainty...

Central bank communication plays an important role in shaping market participants' expectations. This paper studies a simple nonlinear model of monetary policy in which agents have incomplete information about the economic environment. It shows that agents' learning and the dynamics of the...

This paper analyzes the impact of the media on consumers' inflation expectations. We distinguish two channels through which media can influence expectations. First, the intensity of news coverage on inflation plays a role (volume channel). Second, the content of these reports matters (tone...

This paper addresses the output-price volatility puzzle by studying the interaction of optimal monetary policy and agents' beliefs. We assume that agents choose their information acquisition rate by minimizing a loss function that depends on expected forecast errors and information costs....

This paper develops an adaptive learning formulation of an extension to the Ball, Mankiw, and Reis (2005) sticky information model that incorporates endogenous inattention. We show that, following an exogenous increase in the policymaker's preferences for price vs. output stability, the learning...

In this paper, we explore the determinants of newswire coverage of Federal Reserve (Fed) communications. Our sample covers all 344 forward-looking communications made in the period May 1999–May 2004. We find, first, that there is a higher likelihood of newswire coverage for monetary policy...

A fundamentals based monetary policy rule, which would be the optimal monetary policy without commitment when private agents have perfectly rational expectations, is unstable if in fact these agents follow standard adaptive learning rules. This problem can be overcome if private expectations are...