After the emergence of a consensus in the 1980s on the harmful effects of inflation, the last decade of the twentieth century witnessed a market reduction in inflation rates across the world. By the end of the 1980s, empirical evidence collected from large cross-country analyses and numerous case ...

When inflation is chronic, firms develop indexation practices that automatically tie the growth of prices, wages, and other contracts to the performance of some comprehensive price index. The microeconomic advantages of indexation are evident and derive from the immunization of the relative price ...

Monetary policy design has experienced major changes over the last twenty years. These changes had their origin in changes in macroeconomic theory, a better understanding of the importance of achieving and maintaining low inflation, and the abandonment of fixed pegs in favor of floating exchange rate ...

For decades, the exchange rate was at the center of macroeconomic policy debates in emerging markets. Many countries used the nominal exchange rate to bring down inflation, –others—mostly in Latin America—used the exchange rate to implicitly tax the export sector. Currency crises were common and usually ...

Over the last twenty years, many central banks have adopted increasing standards of transparency in communicating their monetary policy objectives, in particular regarding the explicit definition and quantification of their price stability objective or inflation target. One important benefit of increased ...

Since the mid-1970s, the macroeconomic consequences of wage indexation has been the subject of considerable research. Starting with an enthusiastic proposal for indexation by Friedman (1974) and two influential papers by Gray (1976) and Fischer (1977), the academic literature has examined the effects ...

What is the optimal monetary policy, and how can the central bank implement it? Both questions have been extensively studied, but always in the context of simple theoretical structures, which by design are limited in their ability to account for actual observed business cycle fluctuations. This article ...

Developing a better understanding of the costs of disinflation has long been an important objective for macroeconomic research. Since the 1980s, disinflation episodes and strategies have been studied extensively under the assumption of rational expectations. This assumption implies that central bank ...