Controlling Inflation using Interest Rates

Ulrich Haussmann
University of British Columbia/Mathematics

ABSTRACT. In 1988 the newly appointed Governor of the Bank of Canada stated in a public lecture: Monetary policy should be conducted so as to achieve a pace of monetary expansion that promotes stability in the value of money. This means pursuing a policy aimed at achieving and maintaining stable prices.

A two-dimensional stochastic model for the interest rate and the inflation rate is suggested. A control process, entering the dynamics of the interest rate additively, represents the action of the Central Bank. Inflation targeting while stimulating the economy, is achieved by minimizing a cost functional involving all three processes. This is a singular stochastic optimal control problem.

We discuss the analytic solution, which depends on an unknown but smooth free boundary, we fit the model to some Canadian data, and we povide a numerical approximation to the solution of the control problem.