Flexible Inflation Targeting with Emphasis on Asset Prices in the Economy of Iran: Stochastic Optimal Control Approach

The purpose of this paper is to develop an optimal monetary rule within the framework of flexible inflation targeting for the central bank of Islamic Republic of Iran with emphasis on asset prices such as exchange rate, stock prices, housing prices, and gold prices. The paper is comprised of two stages. In the first stage, the parameters of aggregate demand and aggregate supply are estimated for oil exporting and small open economy (case of Iran) using ARDL method. In the second stage, in order to obtain an optimal monetary rule for flexible inflation targeting purposes, we resort to minimizing the central bank's loss function which is comprised of inflation gap as well as output gap using the estimated aggregate demand and aggregate supply as constraints. The problem of minimizing the Central bank loss function is equivalent to an optimal control problem of a nonlinear objective function subject to linear constraints. To solve this problem we use the state space and dynamic programming approach. To appraise the significant effect of asset prices in setting up the optimal monetary rule, we re-estimate the aggregate demand and aggregate supply using asset prices. Comparing the variance of inflation in the two cases shows no statistical significant. Thus the central bank does not need to consider asset prices variation in designing the optimal monetary rule.