Robust Real Rate Rules

Tom Holden

EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: Central banks wish to avoid self-fulfilling fluctuations. Interest rate rules with a unit response to real rates achieve this under the weakest possible assumptions about the behaviour of households and firms. They are robust to household heterogeneity, hand-to-mouth consumers, non-rational household or firm expectations, active fiscal policy and to any form of intertemporal or nominal-real links. They are easy to employ in practice, using inflation-protected bonds to infer real rates. With a time-varying short-term inflation target, they can implement an arbitrary inflation path, including optimal policy. This provides a way to translate policy makers’ desired path for inflation into one for nominal rates. US Federal Reserve behaviour is remarkably close to that predicted by a real rate rule, given the desired inflation path of US monetary policy makers. Real rate rules work thanks to the key role played by the Fisher equation in monetary transmission.

Keywords: robust monetary rules; determinacy; Taylor principle; inflation dynamics; transmission mechanism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E31 E43 E52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024, Revised 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-mac and nep-mon
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/307384/1/RobustRealRateRulesBody.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Robust Real Rate Rules (2024)
Working Paper: Robust real rate rules (2022)
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:zbw:esprep:279481

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().