The inflation targeting regime in place in Canada requires a clear understanding of the monetary policy transmission mechanism and a way to exploit knowledge of that mechanism in making policy decisions. This paper describes the Bank of Canada's current undestanding of the monetary policy transmission ...

A number of recent papers have used policy simulations from small empirical macroeconomic models to assess the efficacy of inflation targeting or, more precisely, inflation forecast targeting (Svensson, 1997a). These include Rudebush and Svensson (1999). The models used to undertake these simulations ...

The conduct of monetary policy in terms of interest rate or other rules has been extensively studied in recent research. This literature gives a central role to forecasts of future inflation and output, and the question of whether monetary policy should be forward- ooking has been subject to discussion ...

Inflation targeting has become an increasingly popular monetary policy strategy, with 21 countries (8 industrial and 13 emerging market economies) targeting inflation and others considering following in their footsteps. Numerous studies of inflation targeting in industrial countries have been conducted, ...

Our previous work develops methods to study optimal policy in Markov jump-linear-quadratic (MJLQ) models with forward-looking variables: models with conditionally linear dynamics and conditionally quadratic preferences, where the matrices in both preferences and dynamics are random (Svensson and ...

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 ...

We study the role of the balance sheet channel of monetary policy in an environment in which credit plays an important role in the funding of new capital investment. Specifically, we ask whether the transmission mechanism of monetary policy is altered in an environment in which financial intermediation ...

In the 1990s several emerging market economies such as Chile Mexico and a number of southeast Asian countries displayed episodes of peaking growth rates combined with increasing current account deficits and appreciating currencies which ended with abrupt reversions in capital flows and recessions. In ...

Sixty years ago, Milton Friedman questioned the usefulness of the optimal control approach because of policymakers’ imperfect knowledge of the economy and favored instead a simple rule approach to monetary policy (1947, 1948). These are still live issues, despite the development of powerful techniques ...

In the twentieth century, Chile experienced most monetary and exchange rate regimes. Periods of fixed exchange rates usually ended in speculative attacks as a result of inconsistent policies or significant external shocks, generating serious real costs and larger exchange rate volatility.