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 ...

Sixty years ago, Milton Friedman questioned the usefulness of the optimal control approach because of policymakers’ imperfect knowledge of the economy and favored instead a simple rule approach to monetary policy (1947, 1948). These are still live issues, despite the development of powerful techniques ...

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 ...

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 ...

The development of general equilibrium models (GEMs) goes back a long way in economics, both at a theoretical level and as a tool for empirical analysis. General equilibrium theory and modeling have proved to be relevant and useful for understanding economic interactions between markets and agents in ...

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 ...

The conduct of monetary policy in terms of interest rate or other rules has been extensively studied in recent research. This literature gives a central role to forecasts of future inflation and output, and the question of whether monetary policy should be forward- ooking has been subject to discussion ...

Monetary policy is made in an environment of substantial uncertainty. Consequently, academic researchers have sought to formally demonstrate the implications of uncertainty, as well as the ways in which central banks can manage it. The theoretical literature on uncertainty distinguishes between three ...