Michael Woodford’s Interest and Prices after twenty years

The present paper reflects about Michael Woodford’s 2003 Interest & Prices, 20 years after its publication. After stressing the three most important achievements of that treatise, it is argued that Woodford pursued a different, and much less recognised, objective: promoting an approach to monetary policy involving an explicit commitment to a ‘history-dependent’ policy rule. Possible reasons why neither prominent authors nor central banks have (thus far) endorsed that approach are investigated.