It is shown how the frequency of central bank intervention in financial markets can affect the incentives for economic agents to acquire information, which will be reflected in market prices and thus become available to policy makers. The optimal frequency of intervention, and therefore the...

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

This paper develops a simple model for measuring potential output that uses data on inflation, unemployment, and capacity utilization. We apply the model to 10 countries, in addition to the United States and the euro area. While there is a substantial amount of uncertainty around our estimates,...

Forward-looking behavior on the part of the monetary authority leads least squares estimates to understate the true growth consequences of monetary policy interventions. We present instrumental variables estimates of the impact of interest rates on real output growth for several European...

This paper evaluates the performance of two alternative policy rules, a forward-looking rule and a spontaneous adjustment rule, under alternative inflation targets, in terms of output losses in a macroeconomic model, using European Union data. The simulations suggest that forward-looking rules...

The introduction of inflation targeting in 2006, together with important economic developments such as dedollarization, marked the beginning of a new macroeconomic framework in Armenia, which is likely to have changed the effectiveness of monetary policy. This paper is the first attempt to...

The depth of the crisis and the weakness of the ensuing recovery led to new ways to implement monetary policy. At the onset of the crisis, central banks in several advanced economies quickly moved policy rates to zero and initiated large-scale asset purchases. In more recent years, with...

In recent months, a number of Directors have expressed support in the Executive Board for a further extension of the temporary exceptional interest waiver on concessional lending. An extension would send a signal of the Fund's continued support for Low-Income Countries at a time when the global...

The three-month Eurepo interest rate, the euro component of the SDR interest rate basket, will be discontinued as of the end of 2014. The three-month Eurepo rate, administered by the European Money Market Institute (EMMI), has been the representative interest rate instrument of the euro area in...

Nominal interest rate pegging leads to instability in an IS-LM model with a vertical long-run Phillips curve and backward-looking inflation expectations. However, it does not lead to instability in several large multicountry econometric models, apparently primarily because these models have...