One of the major economic changes of 2003 is the depreciation of the USD especially against the euro and also against a broadening range of currencies. The continued damage to the USD in the face of improved US economic outlook is similar to the early 2002 scenario when the Euro remained passive...

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...

Monetary policy has been usually analyzed in the context of small macroeconomic models where central banks are allowed to exploit a limited amount of information. Under these frameworks, researchers typically derive the optimality of aggressive monetary rules, contrasting with the observed...

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 -...

Differences in growth, productivity and inflation levels are going to be a prominent feature of the future of EMU, as the convergence process is still ongoing in the new Member States. This convergence process can be described by the Balassa-Samuelson proposition, which states that faster growth...

This paper develops and estimates an unobserved components model for purposes of monetary policy analysis and inflation targeting in a small open economy. Cyclical components are modeled as a multivariate linear rational expectations model of the monetary transmission mechanism, while trend...

This paper re-examines the behavioral responses of key macroeconomic variables in Canada to exogenous shocks to the relative price of investment goods. It does so by developing a stylized two-sector real business cycle model which is simulated to explore its ability to shed new light on the...

El objetivo de este paper es realizar una descripción del caso brasileño, en lo que hace a la salida de un sistema en el cual el ancla nominal de la economía era un tipo de cambio semi-fijo, hacia un régimen de flotación “cuasi” limpia de la moneda, en el que el ancla de la economía...

El tema de la inflación ha sido uno de los más debatidos en los últimos meses. Los incrementos de precios registrados en el primer trimestre de 2005 han avivado la discusión. Este trabajo muestra que el problema está lejos de estar fuera de control y que determinadas medidas de política...