This paper analyzes how imperfect exchange rate pass-through affects the transmission of the CPI inflation targeting optimal monetary policy. In the short run, delayed pass-through constraints monetary policy more than incomplete pass-through and interest rate smoothing amplifies this effect. In...

Monetary policy has an important role in the determination of the inflation rate and the output gap time trajectories. Monetary authorities should choose the nominal interest rate time path that best serves the goals of price stability (primarily) and output growth (as a consequence of the...

Should one think of zero nominal interest rates as an undesirable liquidity trap or as the desirable Friedman rule? I use three different frameworks to discuss this issue. First, I restate Cole and Kocherlakota's (1998) analysis of Friedman's rule: short run increases in the money stock -...

Territorial appointees to an independent central bank (e.g. District Federal Reserve Banks’ presidents, Governors of national central banks at the ECB’s Governing Council) are liable to confront a “role conflict” stemming from a duality of loyalties and allegiances - to the home regional...

The quadratic form of policy makers' loss function has gained a wide consensus in monetary policy analysis mainly because of its analytical tractability. A number of researchers, however, have recently proposed alternative functional forms which have also proved to yield tractable solutions of...

The paper presents a structural model framework for a small open economy. The model, based on optimising households and firms, has been calibrated on Czech macroeconomic data in order to develop an analytic framework suitable for analysing key policy questions related to the Czech Republic’s...

This paper investigates in a consistent semi-structural empirical framework three current issues of monetary policy in the euro area. First, regarding policy transmission we offer a three-stage procedure to combine the efficient estimation of economic structure prior to EMU with current ECB...

What is the optimum quantity of money in a society? This paper answers this question both from the perspective of a utility maximizing model with real balances in the utility function, and employing an inventory theoretic model which focuses attention on the costs of transacting in different...

Macroeconomic Policies of the Economic and Monetary Union: Theoretical Underpinnings and Challenges Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer, The Levy Economics Institute and Leeds University Abstract This paper presents two issues: first, an effort to decipher the type of economic analysis and...