The Role of Central Bank Operating Procedures in an Economy with Productive Government Spending

摘要

We reexamine some of the issues related to the choice of the monetary policy instrument in a dynamic general equilibrium model exhibiting endogenous growth in which a fraction of productive government spending is financed by means of issuing currency. We evaluate the performance of four monetary instruments: monetary aggregate targeting, nominal interest rate targeting, inflation rate targeting and real interest rate targeting. We show that a switch from any other targeting procedure towards the real interest rate targeting may be welfare improving even if the real interest rate targeting is a policy that delivers the most volatile consumption in the short run.