TY  - JOUR
AU  - Benigno,Pierpaolo
AU  - Woodford,Michael
TI  - Optimal Stabilization Policy When Wages and Prices are Sticky: The Case of a Distorted Steady State
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 10839
PY  - 2004
Y2  - October 2004
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10839
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10839.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Pierpaolo Benigno
Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza
Luiss Guido Carli
Viale Romania 32
00197 Rome
ITALY
Tel: 39-0685225-552
E-Mail: pierpaolo.benigno@eief.it

Michael Woodford
Department of Economics
Columbia University
420 W. 118th Street
New York, NY 10027
Tel: 212/854-1094
Fax: 212-854-8059
E-Mail: mw2230@columbia.edu
AB  - Erceg et al. (2000) show that when both wages and prices are sticky, maximization of expected utility is equivalent to minimizing a loss function with three terms, involving measures of the variability of wage inflation, price inflation and the output gap respectively. Here we generalize their analysis, most importantly by not assuming the existence of output and employment subsidies that eliminate the distortions resulting from market power in goods and labor markets, so that the equilibrium level of output under flexible wages and prices would not necessarily be optimal. We show that a quadratic loss function can still be justified that involves the same three terms, albeit with different relative weights and a different definition of the output gap. Many conclusions of Erceg et al. are thus found to apply more generally. However, we argue that in the presence of significant steady-state distortions, simple rules of the kind that they examine are likely to approximate optimal policy less closely than is suggested by their numerical results.
ER  -