Fat-tail shocks and monetary policy

In this paper we extend the model of Kato and Nishiyama (2005) by introducing fat-tailed shocks in a simple new Keynesian framework where the central bank explicitly considers the zero lower-bound constraint on interest rates. We find that shocks with 'excess kurtosis' make monetary policy relatively more aggressive far away from the zero lower bound region though, this difference reverts as the economy gets closer to the constrained region. From a quantitative point of view, our findings suggest that variance-preserving shifts in kurtosis, in the shape of Laplace distributed shocks, do not produce significant effects on the optimal reaction of the central bank. (Audio: Department of Economic Publications)