World commodity prices and their macroeconomic impact especially on emerging economies have long been a main concern in economic research. Decades ago the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis of secularly deteriorating terms of trade (Prebisch 1950 Singer 1950) was the subject of intense debate and became a ...

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 ...

Long-term interest rates have for long played an ambiguous role in the operation of monetary policy. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 that created the Federal Reserve set the monetary policy objective to be: '... to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment stable prices and moderate long-term ...

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...

The long period of low interest rates that followed the global financial crisis has rekindled interest in how short-term interest rates affect bank behavior. In particular it has led to a debate on how low policy rates influence bank risk-taking. This risk-taking channel of monetary policy corresponds ...

In response to the current global crisis the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world have implemented diverse policy measures including purchasing a wide range of securities lending to financial institutions intervening in foreign exchange markets and paying interest on reserves. ...

of how fiscal policy could be used to manage the economy instead.1 A key takeaway from that literature is that fiscal instruments—either unconventional (e.g., consumption and labor subsidies) or more conventional (e.g., stimulus checks)—can in principle...

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 ...

By the mid-2000s both academics and central banks had come to a remarkable consensus on what central banks’ basic strategy should be. However with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 the world of central banking changed forever. The worldwide financial crisis revealed that some of the ...

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 ...