What to Target? Insights from a Lab Experiment

Isabelle Salle

Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada

Abstract: This paper compares alternative monetary policy regimes within a controlled lab environment, where groups of participants are tasked with repeatedly forecasting inflation in a simple macroeconomic model featuring only the dynamics of interest rates, inflation and inflation expectations. Average-inflation targeting can approximate the price path observed under price-level targeting in the presence of disinflationary shocks and enable subjects to coordinate on simple heuristics that reflect the concern of the central bank for past inflation gaps. However, this depends on the exact specification of the policy rule. In particular, if the central bank considers more than two lags, subjects fail to form expectations that are consistent with the monetary policy rule, which results in greater inflation volatility. Reinforcing communication around the target helps somewhat anchor long-run inflation expectations.

Keywords: Inflation targets; Monetary policy communications; Monetary policy framework (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 E31 E52 E7 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 63 pages
Date: 2021-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cba, nep-exp, nep-mac and nep-mon
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/swp2021-53.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: What to target? Insights from a lab experiment (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bca:bocawp:21-53

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada 234 Wellington Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0G9, Canada. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().