Price-level versus inflation targeting under model uncertainty

It has recently been suggested that price-level targeting (PLT) may be a superior approach to monetary policy than inflation targeting (IT) due to its ability to automatically influence inflation expectations to stabilize the economy. In this paper, I analyze whether PLT dominates IT if the ability of the central bank to influence expectations is limited by model uncertainty. Specifically, I analyze how the characterization and performance of PLT and IT rules are impacted if private agents form expectations according to a model that deviates from the policy-maker's reference model. Using robust control to derive robust rules in such a situation, I find that the performance of PLT rules deteriorate faster than that of IT rules as the degree of misspecification increases. Nevertheless, the absolute decline in performance of the PLT rules is relatively small across alternative models that are statistically plausible.