With the end of intermediate exchange rate regimes, countries are either abandoning domestic monetary policy (by choosing super-hard pegs or relinquishing their national currencies altogether) or strengthening independent monetary policymaking (by adopting floating exchange rates, of either the clean ...

Understanding the dynamics of inflation has become an important challenge for both policymakers and researchers over the past decade. Empirical models linking inflation and economic activity—versions of the so-called Phillips curve—have failed...

Central bank economists and academic economists conducting research on the design of monetary policy have made significant advances in recent years. This work has led to a clearer understanding of the desirable properties of interest rate rules, the role of announcements and communication, and the ...

Central bank independence is one of the most remarkable pieces of institutional architecture fostered by economic thinking in the last half century. Theoretical studies in the 1980s stressed central bank independence as a precondition to bringing...

Policymakers have long understood that if fiscal policy runs amuck and monetary policy is forced to raise seigniorage revenues big inflations result. Latin American policymakers understand this outcome better than most. This message is implicit in Cagan’s (1956) initial study of hyperinflation and the ...

The two central issues in monetary policy are separated by time horizon. The first relates to the short run: what is the appropriate monetary policy across the business cycle? The second relates to the long run: waht is the optimal long-run rate of inflation? This paper explores these classic issues ...

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 ...

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 ...

Central banks resort to a variety of alternative arrangements in formulating, conducting, and communicating monetary policy. One increasingly popular type of arrangement is based on a target range for inflation. In this setup the conduct of monetary policy is oriented to keeping inflation withing ...

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 ...