To evaluate whether transparency is beneficial, it is usual to assume that the central bank may choose one of two options, opacity versus truthful communication. However, the monetary policymaker may have incentives to misrepresent private information so as to reduce economic volatility by...

This paper is concerned with interest rate setting by commercial banks and how the transmission of monetary policy is re°ected in these rates. For this purpose we study the case of the Colombian banking industry for the period 1996-2004. Using microdata, the Certi¯cate of Deposit(CD) market...

We analyse three models to determine the conditions under which reserve requirements are used as a part of an optimal monetary policy framework in an inflation targeting regime. In all cases the Central Bank (CB) minimizes an objective function that depends on deviations of inflation from its...

The adoption of a managed regime assumes that interventions are relatively successful. However, while some authors consider that foreign exchange interventions are ineffective, arguing that domestic and foreign assets are close substitutes, others advocate their use and maintain that their...

To date, there is still great controversy as to which exchange rate model should be used or which monetary channel should be considered, when measuring the effects of monetary policy. Since most of the literature relies on structural models to address identification problems, the validity of...

In the past decade the Colombian Economic Authorities undertook a series of measures that reduced the structural fiscal deficit, decreased the Government currency mismatch and deepened the local fixed-rate public bond market. This paper presents some evidence suggesting that these improvements...

El documento tiene como objetivo describir algunos de los elementos fundamentales del mercado interbancario colombiano y del manejo de liquidez por parte del Banco de la República (BR). El documento explica las diferencias entre las principales operaciones en este mercado y describe los...

Se analizan tres tipos de modelos para determinar cuándo, bajo un esquema de inflación objetivo, el Banco Central (BC) debe utilizar los encajes como una herramienta de política monetaria óptima. En todos los casos el BC busca minimizar una función objetivo que consta de las desviaciones de...

The price setting behavior of Colombian retailers of goods and services was studied based on a unique dataset containing 12,052,970 individual price reports covering all items in the Colombian CPI from March 1999 to May 2008. The main results are summarized as follows: 1. Colombian consumer...

In this paper we explore the price setting behavior of Colombian producers and importers using a unique database containing the monthly price reports underlying the Colombian PPI from Jun-1999 to Oct-2006. We focus on five particular questions: 1. Are prices sticky or flexible? 2. Is a price...