Monetary policy is made in an environment of substantial uncertainty. Consequently, academic researchers have sought to formally demonstrate the implications of uncertainty, as well as the ways in which central banks can manage it. The theoretical literature on uncertainty distinguishes between three ...

Following on Keynes’s desire that economists be as useful as dentists, Lucas (1980) argues that this would amount to the following: “Our task, as I see it, is to write a FORTRAN program that will accept specific economic policy rules as ‘input’ and will generate as ‘output’ statistics describing the ...

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 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 ...

It is almost superfluous to begin by emphasizing that recent research in monetary policy analysis has featured a great deal of work concerning conditions for determinacy—that is, existence of a unique dynamically stable rational expectations equilibrium— under various specifications of policy behavior.1 ...

The recent literature examines the conduct of monetary policy in terms of interest rate rules from the viewpoint of imperfect knowledge and learning by economic agents. The stability of the rational expectations equilibrium is taken as a key desideratum for good monetary policy design. Most of this ...

Chile was one of the world’s fastest-growing economies in the 1990s. Its growth rate of 6.8 percent per year from 1990 to 2000 (inclusive) was the seventh highest in the world, and by far the highest in Latin America. Poverty was halved, and while this was overwhelmingly due to growth rather than a ...

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. ...

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 ...