During the 1990s the Chilean economy gradually cut its inflation rate from figures in the thirties to 4.7 percent in 1998. Central bank authorities have declared that the main objective of monetary policy is to reduce inflation to levels comparableto those in industrial countries. The desgnated ...

The regulatory framework of the chilean financial system includes a number of regulations that seek to maintain the financial stability of banks. On one hand, the Central Bank of Chile in its role as regulator and, on the other hand, the Superintendency of Banks in its role as supervisor have set a ...

The role of inflationary persistence has become a recurrent theme in discussions on stabilization programs (Fischer, 1986). This has particularly been the case in recent debates on the merits of exchange-rate-based stabilization plans. Some authors claim that anti-inflationary programs based on ...

Over the last two decades, both developed and developing countries have endured severe banking crises. The U.S. savings and loans (S&Ls) debacle in the 1980s, the chilean banking crisis in the 1980s, the Argentine and Mexsican crises in the mid-1980s and 1990s, as well as the recent financial turmoil ...

Do better functioning financial intermediaries -financial intermediaries that are better at ameliorating information asymmetrics and facilitating transactions- exert a causal influence on economic growth? Providing evidence on causality has implications for policymakers and economists. For instance, ...

Monetary policy in small open economies is typically cast as a choice between an exchange rate anchor (fixed or predetermined exchange rates) and a money anchor (floating exchange rates). Under such regimes, the growth rate of the nominal anchor is set according to the desired long-run inflation rate. ...

The unprecedented number of costly bank failures throughout the world in the last two decades of the twentieth century has focused attention on the need to determine more appropriate ways to improve the performance of countries financial systems. Indeed, a substantial literature is already emerging ...

When inflation is chronic, firms develop indexation practices that automatically tie the growth of prices, wages, and other contracts to the performance of some comprehensive price index. The microeconomic advantages of indexation are evident and derive from the immunization of the relative price ...

Automatic price adjustment mechanisms, or indexation, have arisen in a variety of economies with distinct macroeconomic environments and in different moments in time. Examples include the labor market indexation implemented in various European countries in the postwar era, the indexation of financial ...

Monetary policy regimes around the world changed dramatically over the decade of the 1990s. Central banks have become more transparent, more independent, more accountable, and (apparently) more successful. The biggest transformation has benn the move away from focusing on intermediate objectives, susch ...