IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedfap/97-07.html

Opportunistic and deliberate disinflation under imperfect credibility

Author

Abstract

On strategy for disinflation prescribes a deliberate path towards low inflation. A contrasting opportunistic approach eschews deliberate action and instead waits for unforeseen shocks to reduce inflation. This paper compares the ability of these two approaches to achieve disinflation-and at what cost. We analyze these issues using the Federal Reserve's FRB/US model, which allows alternative assumptions to be made about expectations held by agents in the economy; hence, the credibility of the central bank can be considered in assessing the cost of deliberate and opportunistic disinflation.

Suggested Citation

  • Antulio N. Bomfim & Glenn D. Rudebusch, 1997. "Opportunistic and deliberate disinflation under imperfect credibility," Working Papers in Applied Economic Theory 97-07, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedfap:97-07
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/working-papers-federal-reserve-bank-san-francisco-7038/opportunistic-deliberate-disinflation-imperfect-credibility-639060
    File Function: Full Text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Flint Brayton & Peter A. Tinsley, 1996. "A guide to FRB/US: a macroeconomic model of the United States," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 96-42, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    2. Aksoy, Yunus & Orphanides, Athanasios & Small, David & Wieland, Volker & Wilcox, David, 2006. "A quantitative exploration of the opportunistic approach to disinflation," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(8), pages 1877-1893, November.
    3. Robert Amano & Paul Fenton & David Tessier & Simon van Norden, 1996. "The credibility of monetary policy: a survey of the literature with some simple applications to Caanda," Meeting papers 9610001, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Rotemberg, Julio J, 1982. "Sticky Prices in the United States," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 90(6), pages 1187-1211, December.
    5. Athanasios Orphanides & David W. Wilcox, 2002. "The Opportunistic Approach to Disinflation," International Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 5(1), pages 47-71.
    6. King, Mervyn, 1995. "Credibility and Monetary Policy: Theory and Evidence," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 42(1), pages 1-19, February.
    7. Shiller, Robert J, 1979. "The Volatility of Long-Term Interest Rates and Expectations Models of the Term Structure," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 87(6), pages 1190-1219, December.
    8. Croushore, Dean & Koot, Ronald S., 1994. "A measure of federal reserve credibility," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 16(2), pages 215-231, April.
    9. Sargent, Thomas J, 1978. "Estimation of Dynamic Labor Demand Schedules under Rational Expectations," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 86(6), pages 1009-1044, December.
    10. Peter A. Tinsley, 1993. "Fitting both data and theories: polynomial adjustment costs and error- correction decision rules," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 93-21, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    11. Kozicki, Sharon & Tinsley, P A, 1998. "Moving Endpoints and the Internal Consistency of Agents' Ex Ante Forecasts," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 11(1-2), pages 21-40, April.
    12. Glenn D. Rudebusch & Lars E. O. Svensson, 1998. "Policy rules for inflation targeting," Proceedings, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, issue mar.
    13. Laurence Ball, 1994. "What Determines the Sacrifice Ratio?," NBER Chapters, in: Monetary Policy, pages 155-193, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    14. Fuhrer, Jeffrey C. & Hooker, Mark A., 1993. "Learning about monetary regime shifts in an overlapping wage contract model," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 17(4), pages 531-553, July.
    15. Huh, Chan G. & Lansing, Kevin J., 2000. "Expectations, credibility, and disinflation in a small macroeconomic model," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 52(1-2), pages 51-86.
    16. Taylor, John B., 1993. "Discretion versus policy rules in practice," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 195-214, December.
    17. Antulio N. Bomfim & Robert J. Tetlow & Peter Von zur Muehlen & John Williams, 1997. "Expectations, learning and the costs of disinflation: experiments using the FRB/US model," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 1997-42, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    18. Fuhrer, Jeffrey C., 2010. "Inflation Persistence," Handbook of Monetary Economics, in: Benjamin M. Friedman & Michael Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Monetary Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 9, pages 423-486, Elsevier.
    19. Flint Brayton & Eileen Mauskopf & David L. Reifschneider & Peter A. Tinsley & John Williams, 1997. "The role of expectations in the FRB/US macroeconomic model," Federal Reserve Bulletin, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.), vol. 83(Apr), pages 227-245, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kozicki, Sharon & Tinsley, P. A., 2002. "Dynamic specifications in optimizing trend-deviation macro models," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 26(9-10), pages 1585-1611, August.
    2. Huh, Chan G. & Lansing, Kevin J., 2000. "Expectations, credibility, and disinflation in a small macroeconomic model," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 52(1-2), pages 51-86.
    3. Coenen, Gunter & Wieland, Volker, 2005. "A small estimated euro area model with rational expectations and nominal rigidities," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 49(5), pages 1081-1104, July.
    4. Kozicki, Sharon & Tinsley, P.A., 2005. "What do you expect? Imperfect policy credibility and tests of the expectations hypothesis," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 52(2), pages 421-447, March.
    5. Raf Wouters & Michel Dombrecht, 2000. "Model-based inflation forecasts and monetary policy rules," Working Paper Research 01, National Bank of Belgium.
    6. Brayton, Flint & Levin, Andrew & Lyon, Ralph & Williams, John C., 1997. "The evolution of macro models at the Federal Reserve Board," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 47(1), pages 43-81, December.
    7. Erceg, Christopher J. & Levin, Andrew T., 2003. "Imperfect credibility and inflation persistence," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(4), pages 915-944, May.
    8. Gibbs, Christopher G. & Kulish, Mariano, 2017. "Disinflations in a model of imperfectly anchored expectations," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 100(C), pages 157-174.
    9. Eric Jondeau & Frédéric Sedillot, 1998. "La pr vision des taux longs fran ais et allemands partir d'un modele anticipations rationnelles," Working papers 55, Banque de France.
    10. Clouse James & Henderson Dale & Orphanides Athanasios & Small David H. & Tinsley P.A., 2003. "Monetary Policy When the Nominal Short-Term Interest Rate is Zero," The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, De Gruyter, vol. 3(1), pages 1-65, September.
    11. Peter N. Ireland, 2007. "Changes in the Federal Reserve's Inflation Target: Causes and Consequences," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 39(8), pages 1851-1882, December.
    12. Orphanides, Athanasios, 2003. "Monetary policy evaluation with noisy information," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(3), pages 605-631, April.
    13. Sharon Kozicki & Peter A. Tinsley, 2002. "Alternative sources of the lag dynamics of inflation," Research Working Paper RWP 02-12, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
    14. Glenn D. Rudebusch, 2002. "Assessing Nominal Income Rules for Monetary Policy with Model and Data Uncertainty," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 112(479), pages 402-432, April.
    15. Svensson, Lars E. O., 2000. "Open-economy inflation targeting," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(1), pages 155-183, February.
    16. Christopher F. Baum & Meral Karasulu, 1997. "Credible Disinflation Policy in a Dynamic Setting," Boston College Working Papers in Economics 375, Boston College Department of Economics.
    17. David Dupuis, 2004. "The New Keynesian Hybrid Phillips Curve: An Assessment of Competing Specifications for the United States," Staff Working Papers 04-31, Bank of Canada.
    18. Orphanides, Athanasios & Williams, John C., 2005. "The decline of activist stabilization policy: Natural rate misperceptions, learning, and expectations," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 29(11), pages 1927-1950, November.
    19. John C. Williams, 2003. "Simple rules for monetary policy," Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, pages 1-12.
    20. Aksoy, Yunus & Orphanides, Athanasios & Small, David & Wieland, Volker & Wilcox, David, 2006. "A quantitative exploration of the opportunistic approach to disinflation," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(8), pages 1877-1893, November.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedfap:97-07. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Research Library (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbsfus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.