This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the open economy aspects of the 'delegation game' in which the operation of monetary policy is delegated to independent and `conservative' central bankers with a greater dislike of inflation than the public. When all countries optimally and...

As a companion to a previous paper, monetary and fiscal policy are analyzed in (a) a small open economy and (b) a two-country world, where in addition to a fixed wage causing unemployment, countries now produce specialized products whose prices are fixed, causing excess supply. There are two...

A small open economy model is presented, which allows explicit treatment of uncertainty and its effects on macroeconomic behaviour. Inflation targeting is compared to the welfare maximizing monetary rule and to a fixed nominal exchange rate. It is found that flexible inflation targeting produces...

This paper formulates an optimizing model of a small open economywith a representative (immortal) household, a firm and agovernment. The asset menu consists of domestic currency,non-traded bonds and traded bonds. There is a risk-premium ontraded bonds, which leads to deviations from perfect...

We examine optimal policy in a two-country model with uncertainty and learning, where monetary policy actions affect the real economy through the real exchange rate channel. Our results show that whether policy should be cautious or activist depends on the size of one country relative to...

The recent volatility in global commodity prices and in the price of oil, in particular, has created renewed interest in the question of how monetary policy makers should respond to oil price fluctuations. In this paper, we discuss why this question is ill-posed and has no general answer. The...

In this paper I examine optimal monetary policy and the informational implications of the Phillips curve in a stochastic model of a small open economy. It is assumed that the economy produces both traded and non-traded goods, that capital mobility is perfect and that the economy faces a variety...

A common feature for developing countries that have experienced a sharp drop in inflation without large output losses is the extensive use of capital controls. This study shows that capital controls significantly improve the sacrifice ratio. This element contributes to the explanation of small...

The Paper studies the design of efficient disinflation programmes in open economies using the sacrifice ratio; that is, the cumulative additional un-employment or cumulative lost output required to achieve a 1% sustained reduction in the rate of inflation, as the metric of efficiency. The ’new...

This paper studies the joint behaviour of inflation and unemployment in Spain over the period 1964–95 in order to estimate dynamic Phillips trade-offs and sacrifice ratios in response to a demand shock. We organize our empirical approach as a structural (albeit eclectic) one. In so doing, we...