Towards a New Keynesian theory of the price level

John Barrdear ()

No 532, Bank of England working papers from Bank of England

Abstract: Modifying the standard New-Keynesian model to replace firms' full information and sticky prices with flexible prices and dispersed information, and imposing mild and plausible restrictions on the monetary authority's decision rule, produces the striking results that (i) there exists a unique and globally stable steady-state rate of inflation, despite the possibility of a lower bound on nominal interest rates; and (ii) in the vicinity of steady-state, the price level is determinate (and not just the rate of inflation), despite the central bank targeting inflation. The specification of firms' signal extraction problem under dispersed information removes the need to make use of Blanchard-Kahn conditions to solve the model,thereby removing the need to adhere to the Taylor principle and consequently circumventing the critique of Cochrane (2011). The model admits a determinate, stable solution with no role for sunspot shocks when the monetary authority responds by less than one-for-one to changes in expected inflation,including under an interest rate peg. An extension to include incomplete information on the part of the central bank permits the consideration of (rational) errors of judgement on the part of policymakers and provides a theoretical basis for inertial policymaking without interest rate smoothing, in support of Rudebusch (2002, 2006.

Keywords: New-Keynesian; indeterminacy; dispersed information; FTPL; Blanchard-Kahn; Taylor rules; Taylor principle. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 D84 E31 E52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 56 pages
Date: 2015-07-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-mac and nep-mon
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Related works:
Working Paper: Towards a New Keynesian Theory of the Price Level (2015)
Working Paper: Towards a new Keynesian theory of the price level (2015)
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