Staff Reports
Can U.S. Monetary Policy Fall (Again) into an Expectation Trap?
November 2005 Number 229
JEL classification: E31, E52, E58

Authors: Roc Armenter and Martin Bodenstein

We provide a tractable model to study monetary policy under discretion. We restrict our analysis to Markov equilibria. We find that for all parametrizations with an equilibrium inflation rate of about 2percent, there is a second equilibrium with an inflation rate just above 10 percent. Thus, the model can simultaneously account for the low and high inflation episodes in the United States. We carefully characterize the set of Markov equilibria along the parameter space and find our results to be robust, suggesting that expectation traps are more than just a theoretical curiosity.

Available only in PDFPDF39 pages / 1,938 kb

For a published version of this report, see Roc Armenter and Martin Bodenstein, "Can the U.S. Monetary Policy Fall (Again) in an Expectation Trap?" Macroeconomic Dynamics 12, no. 5 (November 2008): 664-93.

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