Yes. Using the workhorse Smets and Wouters (2007) model of the U.S. economy, we find that the role of the output gap should be equal to or even more important than that of inflation when designing a simple loss function to represenst household welfare. Moreover, we document that a loss function...

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. Using the Smets and Wouters (2007) model of the U.S. economy, we find that the role of the output gap should be equal to or even more important than that of inflation when designing a simple loss function to represent household welfare. Moreover, we document that a...

In perturbation analysis of nonlinear dynamic systems, the presence of a bifurcation implies that the first-order behavior of the economy cannot be characterized solely in terms of the first-order derivatives of the model equations. In this paper, we use two simple examples to illustrate how to...

We describe an algorithm for calculating second order approximations to the solutions to nonlinear stochastic rational expectation models. The paper also explains methods for using such an approximate solution to generate forecasts, simulated time paths for the model, and evaluations of expected...

This paper formulates and compares various specifications of investment adjustment costs in a simple dynamic general-equilibrium model and studies their implications by showing some analytic results. One way to introduce costs is to incorporate them as a constant elasticity of substitution...

This paper illustrates two types of pitfalls when linearization methods are improperly applied. First, if we linearize the constraints before deriving the optimality conditions, the derived conditions are not correct up to first order. Second, even when we obtain the behavior of the economy that...

This paper studies optimal tax policy problem by employing a two-country dynamic general equilibrium model with incomplete asset markets. We investigate the possibility of welfare-improving active, contingent tax policies (under which tax rates respond to changes in productivity) on capital and...