The timelessly optimal monetary policy proposed by Woodford (2003) may be dominated by alternative timeless policies. We provide a formal justification for these alternative policies. We demonstrate why discount rates do not matter and establish that optimizing over the unconditional expectation...

In a New Keynesian macroeconomic model under credible commitment, price level targeting dominates inflation targeting. But with sufficient inflation aversion the inflation-targeting central bank can produce quantitatively similar results to one targeting the price level. The current degree of...

First, we modify the Barro-Gordon model so that a credibility-stabilization tradeoff will remain, even when a performance contract of the type envisaged by Walsh (1995) is imposed on the central bank governor. We do this by modeling a real interest rate bias along with the inflation bias. Then,...