Inflation Forecasts and Monetary Policy
Inflation Forecasts and Monetary Policy
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通货膨胀预测和货币政策
DOI：
10.2307/2953656
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发表时间：
1997
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
M. Woodford
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
B. Bernanke;M. Woodford
将“通胀目标制”作为货币政策战略的提议，留下了一个重要的操作问题，即如何确定当前政策是否与长期通胀目标相一致。一个有趣的可能性是，央行可能会瞄准当前私营部门对通胀的预测，这些预测要么是专业预测者明确做出的，要么是隐含在资产价格中的。我们解决的问题时，中央银行使用私人部门的预测作为政策行动的指导理性预期均衡的存在性和唯一性。在一个动态模型，其中包括缓慢的价格调整和冲击总需求和总供给，我们表明，严格的通货膨胀预测的目标通常是不一致的理性预期均衡的存在，和政策近似严格的通货膨胀预测目标很可能有不良属性。我们还表明，更一般的预测为基础的政策规则的经济体特别容易受到理性预期均衡的不确定性。我们的结论是，虽然私营部门的预测可能包含有用的信息，中央银行，最终货币当局必须依赖于一个明确的经济结构模型来指导他们的政策决定。
Proposals for 'inflation targeting' as a strategy for monetary policy leave open the important operational question of how to determine whether current policies are consistent with the long-run inflation target. An interesting possibility is that the central bank might target current private-sector forecasts of inflation, either those made explicitly by professional forecasters or those implicit in asset prices. We address the issue of existence and uniqueness of rational expectations equilibria when the central bank uses private-sector forecasts as a guide to policy actions. In a dynamic model which incorporates both sluggish price adjustment and shocks to aggregate demand and aggregate supply, we show that strict targeting of inflation forecasts is typically inconsistent with the existence of rational expectations equilibrium, and that policies approximating strict inflation-forecast targeting are likely to have undesirable properties. We also show that economies with more general forecast-based policy rules are particularly susceptible to indeterminacy of rational expectations equilibria. We conclude that, although private-sector forecasts may contain information useful to the central bank, ultimately the monetary authorities must rely on an explicit structural model of the economy to guide their policy decisions.