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 ...

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 ...

In most industrial countries, official interest rate changes tend to be 'smooth'. That is, rates are adjusted relatively infrequently and is small steps. Yet the path of interest rates that emerges as optimal from macroeconomic models is, in general, considerably more volatile. So are the paths of ...

As noted by Leeper (1995) “the business pages of leading newspapers give the impression that the effects of alternative monetary policies on the macroeconomy are well understood and predictable.” They tend “to write with great certainty that when the monetary authority raises interest rates it slows ...

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 ...

Since the mid-1970s, the macroeconomic consequences of wage indexation has been the subject of considerable research. Starting with an enthusiastic proposal for indexation by Friedman (1974) and two influential papers by Gray (1976) and Fischer (1977), the academic literature has examined the effects ...

What is the optimal monetary policy, and how can the central bank implement it? Both questions have been extensively studied, but always in the context of simple theoretical structures, which by design are limited in their ability to account for actual observed business cycle fluctuations. This article ...

En la última década la deuda de consumo con casas comerciales e instituciones financieras ha crecido fuertemente, causando preocupación en autoridades y analistas. Las causas de esta preocupación, sin embargo, no están explícitas. En este articulo buscaremos identificar el tipo de efectos macroeconómicos ...

The objective in building and specifying macroeconomic models is to reflect the main characteristics of an economy in a stylized way. This article describes a macroeconometric model for the Chilean economy. The aim of the model is to forecast the main macroeconomic variables, along with policy exercises ...

The quality of the coordination of expectations, a key issue for monetary policy, obtains from different, but interrelated, channels: both the credibility of the central bank intervention and the ability of decentralized agents to coordinate on a dynamical equilibrium matter. For both purposes, it is ...