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Monetary Policy and the Transition to Rational Expectations

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  • Giuseppe Ferrero

    (Bank of Italy, Economic Research Department)

Abstract

Under the assumption of bounded rationality, economic agents learn from their past mistaken predictions by combining new and old information to form new beliefs. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the policy-maker, by affecting private agents' learning process, determines the speed at which the economy converges to the rational expectation equilibrium. I find that by reacting strongly to private agents' expected inflation, a central bank would increase the speed of convergence. I assess the relevance of the transition period when looking at a criterion for evaluating monetary policy decisions and suggest that a fast convergence is not always suitable.

Suggested Citation

  • Giuseppe Ferrero, 2004. "Monetary Policy and the Transition to Rational Expectations," Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) 499, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    • Handle: RePEc:bdi:wptemi:td_499_04
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    Cited by:

    1. Martin Fukac, 2005. "Should Private Expectations Concern Central Bankers?," CERGE-EI Working Papers wp277, The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague.
    2. GEORGE W. EVANS & BRUCE McGOUGH, 2007. "Optimal Constrained Interest‐Rate Rules," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 39(6), pages 1335-1356, September.
    3. Michele Berardi, 2009. "Monetary Policy with Heterogeneous and Misspecified Expectations," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 41(1), pages 79-100, February.
    4. Alberto Locarno, 2007. "Imperfect Knowledge, Adaptive Learning, and the Bias Against Activist Monetary Policies," International Journal of Central Banking, International Journal of Central Banking, vol. 3(3), pages 47-85, September.
    5. Eugenio Gaiotti & Alessandro Secchi, 2004. "Is there a cost channel of monetary policy transmission? An investigation into the pricing behavior of 2,000 firms," Macroeconomics 0412010, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Sergey Slobodyan & Atanas Christev, 2006. "On learnability of E–stable equilibria," Computing in Economics and Finance 2006 451, Society for Computational Economics.
    7. Martin Fukac, 2006. "New Keynesian Model Dynamics under Heterogeneous Expectations and Adaptive Learning," Working Papers 2006/5, Czech National Bank.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Interest Rate Setting; Adaptive Learning; Rational Expectations; Speed of Convergence;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy
    • C62 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods; Programming Models; Mathematical and Simulation Modeling - - - Existence and Stability Conditions of Equilibrium
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness

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