Taylor rules, central bank preferences and inflation targeting

The objective of this paper is to infer the policy preferences of three inflation targeting central banks, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, using an estimated New Keynesian small open economy model. While I assume that the monetary authorities optimise, I depart from previous research by assuming that monetary policy is implemented via simple Taylor-type rules, as suggested by most of the empirical literature. I then derive the weights in the objective function that make the resulting optimal interest rate rule coincide with its estimated counterpart. Therefore, from the central bank’s point of view, actual policy is optimal.