Seminar on this subject will take place in Sölvhóll, the meeting room in the Central Bank of Iceland, Tuesday, 29. November at 3 pm. Speakers will be Ásgeir Daníelsson, Ólafur S. Helgason and Stefán Þórarinsson from the Central Bank of Iceland.

Abstract: We estimate the natural rate of interest for Iceland using several different methods. First we explore estimates based on the marginal productivity condition for capital, continue with various estimates based on the Euler equation for optimizing households, and end with estimates using state-space models where the natural rate is an unobservable variable, inlcuding the celebrated model by Laubach and Williams. Some of them give unreasonable estimates while others provide estimates that should be helpful for policy makers. The state-space models give estimates of the natural rate with negative trend before and immediately after the financial crises but recovering during last four years of fairly rapid economic growth. The paper also provides estimates of the monetary policy stance in Iceland during the last 20 years and estimates of the implicit inflation target.