In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, speculation arose that the Federal Reserve might respond by easing monetary policy. This paper uses a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model to investigate the appropriate monetary policy response to a natural disaster. We show that the standard Taylor (1993) rule response in models with and without nominal rigidities is to increase the nominal interest rate. That finding is unchanged when we consider the optimal policy response to a disaster. A nominal interest rate increase following a disaster mitigates both temporary inflation effects and output distortions that are attributable to nominal rigidities.
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Paper provided by Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in its series Working Papers with number
2007-025.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
V. V. Chari & Lawrence J. Christiano & Martin Eichenbaum, 1996.
"Expectation Traps and Discretion,"
NBER Working Papers
5541, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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