DP12833 Central Banks Going Long

Author(s):	Ricardo Reis
Publication Date:	March 2018
Keyword(s):	affine models, ceilings, pegs, Taylor rule, yield curve
JEL(s):	E31, E52, E58
Programme Areas:	Monetary Economics and Fluctuations
Link to this Page:	cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=12833

Central banks have sometimes turned their attention to long-term interest rates as a target or as a diagnosis of policy. This paper describes two historical episodes when this happened-the US in 1942-51 and the UK in the 1960s-and uses a model of inflation dynamics to evaluate monetary policies that rely on going long. It concludes that these policies for the most part fail to keep inflation under control. A complementary methodological contribution is to re-state the classic problem of monetary policy through interest-rate rules in a continuous-time setting where shocks follow diffusions in order to integrate the endogenous determination of inflation and the term structure of interest rates.