Historically, many emerging economies, particularly in Latin America, battled against persistently high and volatile inflation. Today, emerging economies continue to experience higher inflation than developed ones, and their central banks deviate...

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 ...

To provide further stimulus to the economy in response to a cascade of shocks that roiled financial markets in the latter part of 2008 the U.S. Federal Reserve started to aggressively employ unconventional monetary policy measures after the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) lowered the target for ...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...