This paper reviews central banks’ legal reform in Latin America during the 1990s and discusses the status of central bank independence in the region. Based on this information, it builds a simplified index of central bank independence which, in addition to the commonly used criteria of...

This paper analyzes the monetary policy response to rising inflation in emerging and developing countries associated with the food and oil price shocks in 2007 and the first half of 2008. It reviews inflation developments in a sample of countries covering all regions and a broad range of...

Using a central bank legislation database, this paper documents and analyzes worldwide institutional arrangements for central bank lending to the government and identifies international practices. Key findings are: (i) in most advanced countries, central banks do not finance government...

This paper explores how real dollarization (dollar indexing of wages), financial dollarization (dollar denomination of financial contracts), and monetary policy interact in a general equilibrium, new open-economy macroeconomics model with real shocks. Real dollarization is avoided as long as the...

This paper addresses the question of why inflation has not yet converged to price stability in Central America and the Dominican Republic and is currently relatively high by Latin American standards. It suggests that despite the institutional strengthening of monetary policy, important flaws...

This paper provides a monetary model with nominal rigidities that differs from the conventional New Keynesian model with firms setting pricing policies instead of price levels. In response to permanent or highly persistent monetary policy shocks this model generates the empirically observed slow...