Understanding the Taylor Rule: A Guide to Central Bank Policies

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Named after the Stanford economist that developed the rule, the Taylor Rule is both a description and prescription of economic policies set forth by central banks. John Taylor developed the rule to act as a general guideline for how a country’s central bank should set interest rates for overnight loans between banks. The goal of the rule is to provide the central banks with a method of ensuring a stabilized economy in the short-run, along with maintaining inflation goals in the long-run. Empirically, the Taylor rule argues that short-term, nominal interest rates should ideally be determined via four separate factors within the economy: the real rate of inflation, deviation between real and desired inflation rates, the assumed real interest …show more content…

While the actual coefficients (i.e. β1 and β2) in the formula are not fixed numbers, Taylor proposed 0.5 for both as a general rule of thumb for the coefficients in his initial 1993 paper introducing the Taylor Rule. Thus, when the proposed 0.5 coefficients are adopted, if the difference between the actual and desired inflation or the actual and target GDP rises one percentage point then short-term interest rates should be increased by half of a percentage point. Because of the nature of the relationships at play in the Taylor Rule formula, many times real world events can create scenarios in which the inflation rate and real GDP may change without resulting in a change of the short-term interest rate. For every one percentage point that the real inflation rate rises, if the logarithm of real GDP were to fall by three points there would be no change in the short-term interest rate. When utilized by central banks as a rule-of-thumb for setting monetary policies, the Taylor Rule provides clear guidance for how to balance competing forces within the

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