In the 1990s, Southeast Asia experienced very rapid growth associated with large and persistent current account deficits. The episode lasted from 1990 to around 1996, ending with the outbreak of the Asian crisis in 1997–98. Current account deficits peaked at around 10 percent of gross domestic product ...

Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models with nominal rigidities have become a popular tool for monetary policy analysis in recent years. The basic sticky price model has been enriched to include additional sources of nominal and real rigidities. These additional elements have been introduced ...

Inflation targeting has become an increasingly popular monetary policy strategy, with 21 countries (8 industrial and 13 emerging market economies) targeting inflation and others considering following in their footsteps. Numerous studies of inflation targeting in industrial countries have been conducted, ...

Our previous work develops methods to study optimal policy in Markov jump-linear-quadratic (MJLQ) models with forward-looking variables: models with conditionally linear dynamics and conditionally quadratic preferences, where the matrices in both preferences and dynamics are random (Svensson and ...

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 ...

We study the role of the balance sheet channel of monetary policy in an environment in which credit plays an important role in the funding of new capital investment. Specifically, we ask whether the transmission mechanism of monetary policy is altered in an environment in which financial intermediation ...

In the 1990s several emerging market economies such as Chile Mexico and a number of southeast Asian countries displayed episodes of peaking growth rates combined with increasing current account deficits and appreciating currencies which ended with abrupt reversions in capital flows and recessions. In ...

The current crisis has centered on borrower defaults on mortgages and the associated effects on banks’ own credit standing (and in several cases their own default), which in turn led to tightened conditions for lending to new (mortgage) borrowers. Any model that does not incorporate all or most of ...

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 ...

Household indebtedness in Chile has received considerable attention in recent years because of the financial deepening process underway in the economy. Although various macroeconomic indicators show significant increases in the last decade, there are few tools for evaluating the real vulnerability of ...