The durable goods sector is much more interest sensitive than the non-durables sector, and these sectoral differences have important implications for monetary policy. In this paper, we perform VAR analysis of quarterly US data and find that a monetary policy innovation has a peak impact on durable expenditures that is roughly five times as large as its impact on non-durable expenditures. We then proceed to formulate and calibrate a two-sector dynamic general equilibrium model that roughly matches the impulse response functions of the data. We derive the social welfare function and show that the optimal monetary policy rule responds to sector-specific inflation rates and output gaps. We show that some commonlyprescribed policy rules perform poorly in terms of social welfare, especially rules that put a higher weight on inflation stabilization than on output gap stabilization. By contrast, it is interesting that certain rules that react only to aggregate variables, including aggregate output gap targeting and rules that respond to a weighted average of price and wage inflation, may yield a welfare level close to the optimum given a typical distribution of shocks.

We add a nominal tax system to a sticky-price monetary business cycle model. When nominal interest income is taxed, the coefficient on inflation in a Taylor-type monetary policy rule must be significantly larger than one in order for the model economy to have a determinate rational expectations equilibrium. When depreciation is treated as a charge against taxable income, an even larger weight on inflation is required in the Taylor rule in order to obtain a determinate and stable equilibrium. These results have obvious implications for assessing the historical conduct of monetary policy.