This paper investigates the empirical relevance of a new framework for monetary policy analysis in which the decision makers are allowed to weight differently positive and negative deviations of inflation and output from the target values. Reduced-form and structural estimates of the central...

This paper shows the way how persistent world inflation shocks hitting a small open economy can re-weight the importance of domestic and foreign factors in the determination of prices. In this sense, we study why the recently observed global disinflation environment may imply a weakening of the...

This paper analyzes the implications of heterogeneity in price setting for both price and inflation inertia. Standard models based on Taylor- or Calvo-style price setting usually assume ex-ante identical firms, while Calvo's approach implies only ex-post heterogeneity. While it is known that...

Based on a simple open economy framework, this analysis rationalizes the existence of “fear of floatingâ€-type responses and uncovers some important implications about to role of pass-through effects and contractionary depreciations. By examining how the optimal monetary response varies...

This paper analyzes the influence of exchange rate regimes on fiscal performance, focusing on the difference between fixed and flexible exchange rates. For these ends, a sample of 83 countries for the 1974-1998 period, the GMM methodology for dynamic proposal panel models proposed by Arellano...

We examine the impact of public information in an economy where agents also have diverse private information. Our work builds on seminal contributions by Townsend (1983) and Phelps (1983), and more recently Woodford (2002), which emphasized the importance of higher-order beliefs – that is,...

We study optimal nominal demand policy in a flexible price economy with monopolistic competition where firms have imperfect common knowledge about the shocks hitting the economy. Information imperfections emerge endogenously because firms are assumed to have finite (Shannon) capacity to process...

There are two crucial conditions for cross-sectional aggregation of AR(1) parameters to produce long memory: 1) heterogeneity and 2) proximity to the unit root. We analyze role of moments, namely the mean and variance, of the distribution of the AR(1) coefficients in generating long memory. The...

In recent times, economists concur that economy's response to monetary policy is somewhat weaker then they were in the past. However, the cause of such change remains an open issue. One plausible reason for this change could be attributed to the financial reform processes that have brought...

Preliminary research at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand has suggested that including exchange rate stabilisation within the goals of monetary policy significantly increases the volatility of inflation, output and interest rates. The benefits of exchange rate stabilisation therefore do not...