[...]The first intellectual development challenging the use ofan activist monetary policy to stimulate output and reduceunemployment is the finding, most forcefully articulatedby Milton Friedman, that the effects of monetary policyhave long and variable lags.1 The uncertainty of the timingand...

[...]In the case studies that follow, we will see that thedesign choices for an inflation-targeting regime fall intofour basic categories: definition and measurement of thetarget, transparency, flexibility, and timing.[...]

Many features of the German monetary targetingregime are also key elements of inflationtargeting in the other countries examined inthis study. Indeed, as pointed out in Bernanke and Mishkin(1997), Germany might best be thought of as a “hybrid”inflation targeter, in that it has more in common...

[...]This paper traces the evolution of Fedwire fromtwelve separate payment operations, linked only by aninterdistrict communications arrangement, to a more unifiedand efficient system. Our account highlights both thedifficulties the Federal Reserve encountered as it soughtto standardize and...

Standard models of international risk sharing with complete asset markets predict a positive association between relative consumption growth and real exchange-rate depreciations across countries. The striking lack of evidence for this link - the consumption/real-exchange-rate anomaly or...

The structure and regulation of a country’s financialmarkets and institutions are the focus of considerablepolicy attention for a number of economic and politicalreasons. Banks and other financial institutions encourage andcollect the savings that finance a country’s economic growth.By...

[...]We begin by discussing the so-called first generation ofmodels, in which crises are viewed in the literature as theunavoidable result of unsustainable policies or fundamentalimbalances. Next, we survey the literature on the secondgeneration of models, which highlights the possibility of...

[...]This article contributes factually to the debate over theopening of emerging markets to foreign participation byexploring the experiences of Argentina and Mexico—two markets that exhibit a significant degree and duration offoreign bank activity.We begin our analysis by presenting the...