Risk and Monetary Policy in a New Keynesian Model

Asset pricing data indicates that shocks to the nominal interest rates are primarily reflected in changes in risk premium. In this paper we build a New Keynesian model in which the behavior of interest rates and risk premium is consistent with this observation. We show that monetary shocks affect the real and nominal variables through the novel channel -- when nominal price adjustment is costly, firms need to balance needs to maximize current period profit and minimize future cost of price adjustments. Increase in risk, which follows a decrease in interest rates, increases firm's weight of future costs in inflationary environments, and leads to an increase in inflation, nominal and real marginal costs and output. Effectiveness of monetary policy varies with the state of the economy and generally is low in low inflationary environments. We also show that a number of well-known predictions of New Keynesian models reverses when interest rate shocks affect risk premium.