In this study I examine the welfare implications of monetary policy by constructing a novel New Keynesian model that properly accounts for asset pricing facts. I find that the Ramsey optimal monetary policy yields an inflation rate above 3.5% and inflation volatility close to 1.5%. The same...

The key insight from this analysis is that monetary policy should be responding more to negative shocks than positive shocks: optimal monetary policy is asymmetric. Moreover, if we take the stance that asset prices indicate a high cost of exposure to long-run risks, this has very interesting...

We document some novel empirical evidence of significant time-varying skewness in the aggregate forecast distribution of the federal funds rate (FFR), i.e. asymmetric monetary policy expectations. To this end, we construct measures of the one-year ahead FFR expectations from responses to the...