Anthony M. Diercks

I am currently a Senior Economist in the Monetary and Financial Market Analysis section in the Division of Monetary Affairs at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington D.C. My fields of interest include production-based asset pricing, monetary economics, and the interaction of policy with financial markets.

The Reader's Guide to Optimal Monetary Policy started out as a small spreadsheet to help organize a basic literature review for my job market paper, The Equity Premium, Long-Run Risk, and Optimal Monetary Policy. Fast forward to the summer of 2017 and economists began to seriously call for a re-evaluation of the Federal Reserve's inflation target of 2 percent. This served as the inspiration for a Saturday morning 4 AM write-up of a five-page proposal for the Journal of Economic Literature, with a table of over 100 studies on optimal inflation.

Although the JEL proposal was swiftly rejected upon submission, the project continued forward and now contains over 250 studies. The simple table has been replaced with an R Shiny application that incorporates numerous visualizations and interactive tables. Furthermore, to better facilitate and appreciate the grand scope of the entire literature on optimal inflation, we have categorized each of the 250 papers based on over 90 hand-selected keywords and carefully compiled these keywords into 16 classifications.

If there is a paper that you think we missed or if you have a new paper that we haven't added yet that you would like to be included, please contact me at Anthony.M.Diercks@frb.gov and we will be sure to incorporate it into the next update. Also, if you find this site useful, feel free to cite "Diercks, Anthony M., 2017. "The Reader's Guide to Optimal Monetary Policy," Social Science Research Network. Retrieved from: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2989237"

This is a dynamic project that will continue on in perpetuity and will be updated on an annual basis.

The goal for this project is to be the definitive source on optimal inflation for every central bank around the world. When making decisions about the inflation target, it is crucial for both policy makers and the general public to be able to evaluate the entire state of knowledge on the topic. The inflation target fundamentally serves as the core through which policy makers rationalize their actions, and their actions impact everyone.

Cole R. Langlois

I am currently a Research Assistant in the Financial and Macroeconomic Stability Studies Section in the Division of Financial Stability. I was a summer intern at the Federal Reserve in 2018 and graduated from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington with degrees in Economics and Mathematics in 2019.

The analysis and conclusions set forth are those of the authors and do not indicate concurrence by other members of the research staff or the Board of Governors.