Inflation zone targeting and the Federal Reserve

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the Federal Reserve (the Fed) implicitly implemented an inflation zone targeting policy. To this end, I estimate the piecewise linear Taylor rule, in which the magnitude of the inflation coefficient depends on whether inflation lies within or outside a target zone. The estimation results show that the Fed conducted an inflation zone targeting policy during the 1987-2004 period. In addition, it is found that a symmetric (not asymmetric) specification of the piecewise linear rule is adequate to describe the inflation zone targeting behavior of the Fed.