ABSTRACT
Recently, in macroeconomics the quantitative study of monetary policy rules has been undertaken in a variety of frameworks. Such frameworks are, for example, the large-scale macroeconometric models (Fair 1984 and the contributions collected in Taylor 1999), the VAR (Bernanke and Blinder 1992; Sims 2000) and the optimization-based approach (Rotemberg and Woodford 1999; Christiano and Gust 1999). Usually two alternative monetary policy rules have been considered, namely the monetary authority targeting (1) monetary aggregates or (2) the interest rate. The former implies an indirect and the latter a direct inflation targeting. The latter rule originates in Taylor (1993) and has also been called the Taylor rule. 1 As has been shown historically, most central banks of OECD countries switched during the 1980s from the policy of controlling monetary aggregates to targeting inflation rates through controlling short-term interest rates. 2 The second type of monetary policy rule, the Taylor rule, has recently been given much attention and has been evaluated extensively in the context of macroeconometric frameworks (see Taylor 1999).
