We estimate a forward-looking monetary policy reaction function for the postwar United States economy, before and after Volcker’s appointment as Fed Chairman in 1979. Our results point to substantial differences in the estimated rule across periods. In particular, interest rate policy in the Volcker-Greenspan period appears to have been much more sensitive to changes in expected in�ation than in the pre-Volcker period. We then compare some of the implications of the estimated rules for the equilibrium properties of in�ation and output, using a simple macroeconomic model, and show that the Volcker-Greenspan rule is stabilizing. I.

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 rational expectations, short-run nominal inertia, and long-run monetary neutrality, but differ in many other respects (e.g., the dynamics of prices and real expenditures). We compute the output-inflation volatility frontier of each model for alternative specifications of the interest rate rule, subject to an upper bound on nominal interest rate volatility. Our analysis provides strong support for rules in which the first-difference of the federal funds rate responds to the current output gap and the deviation of the one-year average inflation rate from a specified target. In all four models, first-difference rules perform much better than rules of the type proposed by Taylor (1993) and Henderson and McKibbin (1993),

This paper investigates the implications of noisy information regarding the measurement of economic activity for the evaluation of monetary policy. A common implicit assumption in such evaluations is that policymakers observe the current state of the economy promptly and accurately and can therefore adjust policy based on this information. However, in reality, decisions are made in real time when there is considerable uncertainty about the true state of affairs in the economy. Policy must be made with partial information. Using a simple model of the U.S. economy, I show that failing to account for the actual level of information noise in the historical data provides a seriously distorted picture of feasible macroeconomic outcomes and produces inefficient policy rules. Naive adoption of policies identified as efficient when such information noise is ignored results in macroeconomic performance worse than actual experience. When the noise content of the data is properly taken into account, policy reactions are cautious and less sensitive to the apparent imbalances in the unfiltered data. The resulting policy prescriptions reflect the recognition that excessively activist policy can increase rather than decrease economic instability.

The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Bank of England. We have benefited greatly from the comments and suggestions of Bill

Structural vector autoregressions (VARs) are widely used to trace out the effect of monetary policy innovations on the economy. However, the sparse infor-mation sets typically used in these empirical models lead to at least three poten-tial problems with the results. First, to the extent that central banks and the private sector have information not reflected in the VAR, the measurement of policy innovations is likely to be contaminated. Second, the choice of a specific data series to represent a general economic concept such as “real activity” is often arbitrary to some degree. Third, impulse responses can be observed only for the included variables, which generally constitute only a small subset of the variables that the researcher and policy-maker care about. In this paper we investigate one potential solution to this limited information problem, which combines the standard structural VAR analysis with recent developments in factor analysis for large data sets. We find that the information that our factor-augmented VAR (FAVAR) methodology exploits is indeed important to properly identify the monetary transmission mechanism. Overall, our results provide a comprehensive and coherent picture of the effect of monetary policy on the economy.

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In recent years, activist monetary policy rules responding to inflation and the level of economic activity have been advanced as a means of achieving effective output stabilization without inflation. Advocates of such policies suggest that their flexibility may yield substantial stabilization benefits while avoiding the excesses of overzealous discretionary fine-tuning such as is thought to characterize the experience of the 1960s and 1970s. In this paper, I demonstrate that these conclusions are misguided. To illustrate this fact, I construct a database with data available to policymakers in real time from 1965 to 1993 and, using an estimated model, I perform counterfactual simulations under alternative informational assumptions regarding the knowledge policymakers can reasonably have had about the state of the economy when policy decisions were made. Using realistic informational assumptions overturns findings favoring activist policies in favor of prudent policies that ignore short-run stabilization concerns altogether. The evidence points to misperceptions of the economy’s productive capacity

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This paper examines the implications of recent research on monetary policy rules for practical monetary policy making, with special emphasis on strategies for setting interest rates by the European Central Bank (ECB). The paper draws on recent research and new simulations of a large open economy model to assess the efficiency of a simple benchmark rule in comparison with other proposed rules. The paper stresses new results on the robustness of monetary policy rules in which each rule that is optimal or good according to one model or researcher is tested for robustness by other researchers using different models. Because of the large increase in the number of economists focussing on econometric evaluation of monetary policy rules for the interest rate instrument and because of the parallel increase in the variety of models being developed for this purpose, much more evidence is becoming available on the robustness of simple monetary policy rules for the interest rate than ever before.