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 financial developments of the last decade had a large impact on the management of risk providing more diversified portfolios to investors. Based on these complex financial contracts investors were able to shift the investment possibilities frontier outward however that movement generated intricate ...

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 job of central bankers is to use the monetary powers granted to them to promote price stability, sustainable growth, and a stable financial system. They do this in an environment fraught with unavoidable uncertainties. But, in conducting policy...

During 2007-2009 the world underwent a deep economic crisis that has been termed the Great Recession where total output is estimated to have decreased 0.6%. This event has had two salient characteristics: it was a financial shock that originated in advanced economies and in the end most of the economies ...

Increased volatility in the world prices of commodities such as oil and food which are basic imports for many countries has rekindled interest on the question of how monetary policy should best adjust to external commodity price movements. Recent studies have analyzed the issue in the New Keynesian ...

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 ...

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 ...

The papers that comprise the different chapters of this volume were presented in the XVII Annual Conference on Central Banking that took place at the Central Bank of Chile Santiago during November 14 and 15 2011. While the global economic environment has changed considerably from the end of 2011 to ...

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 ...