This study takes stock of the institutional reform of monetary policy in Latin America since the early 1990s. It argues that strengthening the legal independence of central banks, together with macroeconomic policies, was instrumental in reducing inflation from three-digit annual rates in the...

In the debate on monetary policy strategies on both sides of the Atlantic, it is now almost a commonplace to contrast the Fed and the ECB by pointing out the former’s flexibility and capacity to adjust rigidity, and the latter’s extreme caution, and obsession with low inflation. In looking...

This paper provides an overview of central banking arrangements in those European countries that have adopted the euro. Issues addressed include the structure of the “Eurosystem” and its central banking functions, the kind of independence granted to the system and the role of monetary policy...

Challenging the conventional wisdom that structural problems are to blame for the euro area’s protracted domestic demand stagnation, this paper sets out to shed some fresh light on the role of the ECB in the ongoing EMU crisis. Contrary to the widely held interpretation of the ECB as an...

This study aims to analyse the Portuguese economic policy of disinflation through a nominal stabilization policy of the Portuguese escudo. We study the pegging of the Portuguese escudo (PTE) to the Deutsch mark (DM) knowing the reputation of the Bundesbank for its anti- inflationary record and...

This paper describes the Federal Reserve's analytical framework under Volcker and Greenspan, as it was constructed in the early 1980s, during a period of high inflation. It traces the modeling and policy implications of this framework. It discusses the Fed's actual track record and the state of...

The monetary system in Estonia is based on the currency board arrangement with German Mark. The strong commitments and rule-based features of currency board imply that there is no active monetary policy in Estonia – all necessarily monetary djustments are left to the market forces. Under fixed...

Woodford’s (2003) model of a cashless economy is the basis for his book Interest and Prices. Since Woodford assumes complete markets, this paper explicitly includes state-contingent securities with either temporary money or a cash-in-advance constraint to analyze Woodford’s logic. This...

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...

This paper examines the optimal frequency of monetary policy meetings when their schedule is pre-announced. Our contribution is twofold. First, we show that in the standard New Keynesian framework infrequent but periodic revision of monetary policy may be desirable even when there are no...