The Pitfalls of Discretionary Monetary Policy
FRB of Philadelphia Working Paper No. 01-16
40 Pages Posted: 13 Jan 2002
Date Written: October 2001
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: discretion, time-consistency problem, optimal monetary policy, sticky prices, multiple equilibria
JEL Classification: E52, E51, E58, E31, E42
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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