Ricerc@Sapienza

Policymakers are stuck in time. Political short-termism, policy myopia, policy short-sightedness, and similar words have been coined to emphasize the present-centric policy thinking. Politics tends to produce short time horizons, and as a result, policymakers often fail to use present opportunities to mitigate future harms. Focusing on fiscal and monetary strategic interactions, given different separate decision makers, our paper aims to explore the effects of policymakers’ time horizons on debt stabilization.

We study the extent to which the belief-formation process affects the dynamics of macroeconomic variables when the central bank uses forward guidance. Recent literature has emphasized two kinds of puzzle associated to forward guidance. First, standard sticky-price models imply that far future forward guidance has huge and implausible effects on current outcomes, these effects grow in its horizon. Second, these models tend to overestimate the effects of central bank's commitment to keep interest rate below the natural rate for a given period of time.

By using Bayesian techniques, our paper investigates behavioral New-Keynesian DSGE models derived under two parsimonious alternatives to introduce heterogeneous expectations: the Euler equation and the anticipated-utility approach. First, we explore the relation between the expectation formation processes and the model determinacy for a broad range of parameterizations by using global sensitivity analysis and Monte Carlo filtering. Second, we perform model comparison to assess how much the two alternatives are consistent with macro and expectation survey data.

This paper introduces model uncertainty into a behavioral New Keynesian DSGE framework and derives robust optimal monetary policies. We build a heterogeneous agents DSGE model, where a fraction of agents behave according to some forms of bounded rationality (boundedly rational agents), while the reminder operate on the basis of expectations that are corrected on average (rational agents). We consider two potential mechanisms of expectations formation to generate beliefs.

This paper builds a stylized simple sticky-price New Keynesian model where agents' beliefs are not homogeneous. We assume that agents choose optimal plans while considering forecasts of macroeconomic conditions over an infinite horizon. A fraction of them (boundedly rational agents) use heuristics to forecast macroeconomic variables over an infinite horizon. In our framework, we study optimal policies consistent with a second-order approximation of the policy objective from the consumers' utility function, assuming that the steady state is not distorted.