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...

The Federal Reserve and other central banks tend to change short-term interest rates in sequences of small steps in the same direction and reverse the direction of interest rate movements only infrequently. These characteristics, often referred to as interest-rate smoothing, have led to...

The European Central Bank has assigned a special role to money in its two pillar strategy and has received much criticism for this decision. The case against including money in the central bank's interest rate rule is based on a standard model of the monetary transmission process that underlies...

In this paper, we investigate the properties of alternative monetary policy rules using four structural macroeconometric models: the Fuhrer-Moore model, Taylor's Multi-Country Model, the MSR model of Orphanides and Wieland, and the FRB staff model. All four models incorporate the assumptions of...

Research on learning-by-doing has typically been restricted to cases where estimation and control can be treated separately. Recent work has provided convergence results for more general learning problems where experimentation is an important aspect of optimal control. However, the associated...

The Federal Reserve allowed unemployment to fall substantially in the late 1990s, to a level well below earlier estimates of the NAIRU, without a corresponding tightening of monetary policy. In addition, Meyer (1999) has suggested that episodes of heightened uncertainty about the NAIRU may...