Monetary Policy Response to Oil Price Shocks

How should monetary authorities react to an oil price shock? This paper shows that in a noncompetitive economy, policies that perfectly stabilize prices entail large welfare costs, hence explaining the reluctance of policymakers to enforce them. The policy trade‐off is nontrivial because oil (energy) is an input to both production and consumption. As welfare‐maximizing policies are hard to implement and communicate, I derive a simple interest rate rule that depends only on observables but mimics the optimal plan in all dimensions. The optimal rule is hard on core inflation but accommodates oil price changes.