The Federal Reserve increasingly has relied on forward guidance about the future path of the federal funds rate to implement monetary policy since the federal funds target rate reached its effective lower bound. The enhanced use of forward policy guidance has drawn attention to any change in its...

In theory, monetary policies that target the price level, as opposed to the inflation rate, should be highly effective at stabilizing the economy and avoiding deflation in the presence of the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates. With such a policy, if the short-term interest rate is...

A central tenet of inflation targeting is that establishing and maintaining well-anchored inflation expectations are essential. In this paper, we reexamine the role of key elements of the inflation targeting framework towards this end, in the context of an economy where economic agents have an...

Summary of proceedings from the 1986 Fall Academic Conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

Empirical estimates of the Federal Reserve's policy rule typically find that the regression coefficient on the lagged federal funds rate is around 0.8 and strongly significant. One economic interpretation of this result is that the Fed intentionally "smoothes" interest rates, i.e., policymakers...

I review the case for pegging the exchange rate by surveying the recent theoretical literature on the choice of exchange rate regimes. This literature suggests that by enhancing the transparency or controllability of monetary policy, pegging may be more effective in lowering inflation...