My lessons from six years of practical policy-making include (1) being clear about and not deviating from the mandate of flexible inflation targeting (price stability and the highest sustainable employment), including keeping average inflation over a longer period on target; (2) not adding...

Price-level targeting (without base drift) and inflation targeting (with base drift) are compared under commitment and discretion, with persistence in unemployment. Price-level targeting is often said to imply more short-run inflation variability and thereby more employment variability than...

This Paper argues that inflation-targeting central banks should announce explicit loss function with numerical relative weights on output-gap stabilization and use and announce optimal time-varying instrument-rate paths and corresponding inflation and output-gap forecasts. Simple voting...

‘Forecast targeting’, forward-looking monetary policy that uses central-bank judgment to construct optimal policy projections of the target variables and the instrument rate, may perform substantially better than monetary policy that disregards judgment and follows a given instrument rule....

The so-called P* model is frequently used or referred to in discussions of monetary targeting. This gives the impression that the P* model might provide some rationale for monetary targeting or for the monetary reference value used by the Eurosystem. The P* model implies that inflation is...

We examine to what extent variants of inflation-forecast targeting can avoid stabilization bias, incorporate history-dependence, and achieve determinacy of equilibrium, so as to reproduce a socially optimal equilibrium. We also evaluate these variants in terms of the transparency of the...

The paper discusses the choice between inflation targeting and monetary targeting as a strategy for the Eurosystem, the actual strategy the Eurosystem announced in the fall of 1998, the framework for policy decisions appropriate for achieving the goals of the Eurosystem, the role of exchange...

Using a small empirical model of inflation, output, and money estimated on US data, we compare the relative performance of monetary targeting and inflation targeting. The results show that monetary targeting would be quite inefficient, with both higher inflation and output variability. This is...

This paper discusses how price stability can be defined and how price stability can be maintained in practice. Some lessons for the Eurosystem are also considered. With regard to defining price stability, the choice between price-level stability and low (including zero) inflation and the...

I report some personal views and reflections on transparency experiences and transparency challenges following my first year and a half as Deputy Governor at Sveriges Riksbank regarding (1) flexible inflation targeting, (2) the role of transparency in inflation targeting and committee decisions...