Variable and high rates of price inflation in the 1970s and 1980s led many countries to delegate the conduct of monetary policy to "instrument-independent" central banks and to give their central banks a clear mandate to pursue price stability and instrument independence to achieve it. Advances...

Yes, it makes a lot of sense. This paper studies how to design simple loss functions for central banks, as parsimonious approximations to social welfare. We show, both analytically and quantitatively, that simple loss functions should feature a high weight on measures of economic activity,...

Ongoing demographic changes have brought about a substantial shift in the size and age composition of the population, which are having a significant impact on the global economy. Despite potentially grave consequences, demographic changes usually do not take center stage in many macroeconomic...

This paper studies the implication of extreme shocks for monetary policy. The analysis is based on a small-scale New Keynesian model with sticky prices and wages where shocks are drawn from asymmetric Generalized Extreme Value distributions. A nonlinear perturbation solution of the model is...

This paper develops a model of optimal debt maturity in which the government cannot issue statecontingent debt. As the literature has established, if the government can perfectly commit to fiscal policy, it fully insulates the economy against government spending shocks by purchasing short-term...

This paper proposes a method and a toolkit for solving optimal policy with imperfect commitment in linear quadratic models. As opposed to the existing literature, our method can be employed in medium- and large-scale models typically used in monetary policy. We apply our method to the Smets and...

This paper estimates and tests a new Keynesian small open economy model in the tradition of Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Evans (2005) and Smets and Wouters (2003) using Bayesian estimation techniques on Swedish data. To account for the switch to an inflation targeting regime in 1993 we allow for...

In this paper, we use Monte Carlo methods to study the small sample properties of the classical maximum likelihood (ML) estimator in artificial samples generated by the New-Keynesian open economy DSGE model estimated by Adolfson et al. (2008) with Bayesian techniques. While asymptotic...

We show how to construct optimal policy projections in Ramses, the Riksbank's openeconomy medium-sized DSGE model for forecasting and policy analysis. Bayesian estimation of the parameters of the model indicates that they are relatively invariant to alternative policy assumptions and supports...

This paper studies the transmission of shocks and the trade-offs between stabilizing CPI inflation and alternative measures of the output gap in Ramses, the Riksbank's empirical dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model of a small open economy. The main results are, first, that the...