The pitfalls of discretionary monetary policy

Aubhik Khan, Robert King (rking@bu.edu) and Alexander Wolman

No 01-16, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Abstract: In a canonical staggered pricing model, monetary discretion leads to multiple private sector equilibria. The basis for multiplicity is a form of policy complementarity. Specifically, prices set in the current period embed expectations about future policy, and actual future policy responds to these same prices. For a range of values of the fundamental state variable ? a ratio of predetermined prices ? there is complementarity between actual and expected policy, and multiple equilibria occur. Moreover, this multiplicity is not associated with reputational considerations: it occurs in a two-period model.

Keywords: Monetary; policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-dge and nep-mon
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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