Essays in Monetary Policy

This dissertation presents three chapters addressing issues pertaining to monetary policy, information, and central bank communication. The first chapter studies optimal monetary policy in an environment where policy actions provide a signal of economic fundamentals to imperfectly informed agents. I derive the optimal discretionary policy in closed form and show that, in contrast to the perfect information case, the signaling channel leads the policymaker to be tougher on inflation. The strength of the signaling effect of policy depends on relative uncertainty levels. As the signaling effect strengthens, the optimal policy under discretion approaches that under commitment to a forward-looking linear rule, thereby decreasing the stabilization bias. This contributes to the central bank finding it optimal to withhold its additional information from private agents. Under a general linear policy rule, inflation and output forecasts can respond positively to a positive interest rate surprise when the signaling channel is strong. This positive response is the opposite of what standard perfect information New Keynesian models predict and it matches empirical patterns found by previous studies. Chapter 2 provides new empirical evidence supporting the predictions of the model presented in Chapter 1. More specifically, I find that the responses of inflation forecasts to interest rate surprises is especially positive when there is greater uncertainty regarding the previous forecast. Finally, Chapter 3 examines whether communications by the Federal Open Market Committee might have the ability to influence financial market responses to macroeconomic news. In particular, I am able to relate labor-related word use in FOMC statements and meeting minutes to the amount by which interest rates' response to labor-related news exceeds their response to other news.