Labor market friction, nominal wage rigidities, and monetary policy in a small open economy

We incorporate some of the essential ingredients and properties of search and matching model of unemployment into a New Keynesian small open economy and study their implications for monetary policy. Three simple interest rate rules (strict Inflation Targeting, standard Taylor rule, and a modified Taylor rule) are studied. The message conveyed from this study can be viewed as twofold. First, conditional on the domestic productivity shock, a standard Taylor rule is welfare enhancing. Conditional on the foreign income shock, however, welfare losses is minimized under the strict inflation targeting rule. Second, the modified Taylor rules that respond to unemployment rate rather than output is second-best for both domestic technology and foreign income shocks. Therefore, it can be argued that stabilizing unemployment rate rather than output could be the better if policy-maker is uncertain about the types of shocks.