Rule-of-Thumb Consumers, Nominal Rigidities and the Design of Interest Rate Rules

Author
Ocampo Díaz, Sergio
Date
May 2013
This paper argues that, in the presence of nominal wage rigidities, the existence of Rule-of-Thumb agents and price rigidities does not cause a change in the Taylor Principle as suggested by Galí et al. (2004), and that the only rigidity relevant for this result is that faced by Rule-of-Thumb consumers. For doing so, a New-Keynesian model with Rule-of-Thumb agents is proposed. The model discriminates between both type of agents when defining wage rigidities, thus al- lowing to identify and measure the factors that affect the Taylor Principle, this also allows to drop complete markets for Rule-of-Thumb agents, and the simple use of non-separable utility functions in order to determine the incidence of the wealth effect when facing staggered wages.