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 ...

Inflation targeting was first introduced in 1990, in New Zealand. Since then it has been adopted by more than twenty countries. This period of fifteen years has seen major progress in practical monetary policy. In particular, the practice of inflation targeting has led to a more systematic and consistent ...

Inflation targeting has become an increasingly popular approach to the conduct of monetary policy worldwide since the early 1990s. Most of the countries that have adopted inflation targeting judge the experiment favorably, at least thus far. In many countries, the adoption of inflation targeting has ...

Three parallel and certainly not independent changes have occurred in central bank practices over the past fifteen years. The first is the spread of central bank independence, which is tied to the notion that even when the government plays a role in setting the goals of monetary policy, central banks ...

After a long history of high and volatile inflation, the Central Bank of Chile began implementing its monetary policy in the early 1990s by announcing yearly targets for inflation. This new framework was the first step toward a full-fledged inflation-targeting setup, although the Central Bank continued ...

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 ...

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 ...

Does tight monetary policy stabilize the currency after a collapse?. Does the effect of high interest rates on the exchange rate depend on the condition of the banking system? The East Asian crises and other recent currency crises have put these questions at the center of economic policymaking decisions.

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 ...

Monetary policy in South Africa's emerging market economy, given capital account liberalization and severe constraints on fiscal policy, has the major responsability for curbing inflation and currency instability while trying to ensure sufficient growth for longer-term political stability and the ...

With the end of intermediate exchange rate regimes, countries are either abandoning domestic monetary policy (by choosing super-hard pegs or relinquishing their national currencies altogether) or strengthening independent monetary policymaking (by adopting floating exchange rates, of either the clean ...

Disinflation in Israel has been a relatively slow process. It took more than a decade for the annual rate of inflation to fall from about 18 percent in the late 1980s to less than 4 percent in the late 1990s. For 2000 and 2001 the government has set an inflation target range of 3 to percent. Whether ...

Mediante un modelo de economía pequeña y abierta, especializada en la producción de materias primas y que exhibe fricciones exógenas en la fijación de precios y salarios, estudiamos la respuesta óptima de la política monetaria y cambiaria tras un shock positivo (negativo) en el precio del producto ...

Este artículo es una mirada a la conferencia XV del Banco Central de Chile 'Movilidad de Capitales y Política Monetaria'. En su conjunto, los estudios presentados en ella tratan diversos aspectos de las causas, consecuencias y desafíos de política, relacionados con los ciclos de auge y caída que han ...

Un dilema de larga data en las economías abiertas se refiere a la moneda en que se denominan los precios nominales y los contratos. Este trabajo analiza la interacción entre los precios de exportación de las empresas y la política monetaria, y sus posibles implicancias macroeconómicas en la sincronización ...

For decades until the early 1990s, Latin America was the region of the world with the highest average level of inflation. High inflation was the cumulative result of a long history of activist economic policies based on a disregard for macroeconomic stability. These policies culminated in large ...

Policymarkers and the academic community have reached an increasing consensus during the last two decades: the primary objective of monetary policy should be to control inflation (see, for example, King, 1999). A less settled issue is the appropriate role of the central bank regarding other, secondary ...

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 ...

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 ...

This paper explores the connection between the monetary transmission mechanism -the channel through which a change in monetary policy affects the economy- and the choice of monetary policy rules to guide central bank decisions. Differente views of the monetary transmission mechanism are readily apparent ...