Does the adoption of an inflation target by a country have an effect on that country's rate of inflation and on inflation's interaction with real economic variables? Does inflation targeting alter private-sector expectations? The question of effectiveness must be posed as a counterfactual -did...

Following the investment-cash flow literature, we test whether bank lending is constrained by the availability of insured deposits--a necessary condition for the existence of bank lending channel of monetary policy. We treat insured deposits as a type of "internal fund," similar to cash flows....

Recent research has questioned the usefulness of Vector Autoregression (VAR) models as a description of monetary policy, especially in light of the low correlation between forecast errors from VARs and those derived from Fed funds futures rates. This paper presents three findings on VARs'...

In this paper we rethink the NAIRU concept and examine whether it might have a useful role in monetary policy. We argue that it can, but success depends critically on defining NAIRU as a short-run concept and distinguishing it from a long-run concept like the natural rate of unemployment. We...

Taking explicitly into account the forward-looking nature of consumption, this paper derives a non-linear equation for consumption growth in which the coefficient of contemporaneous expected income growth is an increasing (decreasing) function of lagged variables positively (negatively)...

This paper examines the relationship of the term structure of interest rates to monetary policy instruments and to subsequent real activity and inflation in both Europe and the United States. The results show that monetary policy is an important determinant of the term structure spread, but is...

On the eve of a major change in the world monetary system, the adoption of a single currency in Europe, our theoretical understanding of the implications of the exchange rate regime for trade and capital flows is still limited. We argue that two key model ingredients are essential to address...

Several articles published in the 1990s have identified empirical relationships between the term structure of real and nominal interest rates, on one hand, and future real output and inflation, on the other. Among these are Mishkin (1990a), Estrella and Hardouvelis (1991), Bernanke and Blinder...

This paper investigates the implications of a regime switching monetary policy on real business cycle fluctuations. In a Cash-in-Advance model, a regime switching monetary policy with the typical observed business cycle durations could cause sizable fluctuations in real variables such as...