STABILISATION POLICY, RATIONAL EXPECTATIONS AND PRICE‐LEVEL VERSUS INFLATION TARGETING: A SURVEY
综述比较通胀目标制和价格水平目标制作为宏观经济稳定政策的文献，聚焦新凯恩斯模型中的最优货币政策、零下限、金融摩擦和转型成本，发现价格水平目标制在承诺简单泰勒规则时更优，但福利效果依赖于理性预期和新凯恩斯假设。
Abstract We survey literature comparing inflation targeting (IT) and price‐level targeting (PT) as macroeconomic stabilisation policies. Our focus is on New Keynesian models and areas that have seen significant developments since Ambler's (2009, Price‐level targeting and stabilisation policy: a survey. Journal of Economic Surveys 23(5): 974–997) survey: optimal monetary policy; the zero lower bound; financial frictions and transition costs of adopting a PT regime. Ambler's conclusion that PT improves social welfare in New Keynesian models is fairly robust, but we note an interesting split in the literature: PT consistently outperforms IT in models where policymakers commit to simple Taylor‐type rules, but results in favour of PT when policymakers minimise loss functions are overturned with small deviations from the baseline model. Since the beneficial effects of PT appear to hang on the joint assumption that agents are rational and the economy New Keynesian, we discuss survey and experimental evidence on rational expectations and the applied macro literature on the empirical performance of New Keynesian models. Overall, the evidence is not clear‐cut, but we note that New Keynesian models can pass formal statistical tests against macro data and that models with rational expectations outperform those with behavioural expectations (i.e. heuristics) in direct statistical tests. We therefore argue that policymakers should continue to pay attention to PT.