This paper provides comprehensive empirical evidence that supports the predictions of Sargent and Wallace's (1981) "unpleasant monetarist arithmetic" that an increase in public debt is typically inflationary in countries with large public debt. Drawing on an extensive panel dataset, we find that...

Expansionary monetary policies in key industrial countries and sharply depreciating U.S. dollar exchange rate sent commodities prices soaring at unprecedented rates during 2003-2007. Food prices rose to alarming levels threatening malnutrition and food riots. In contrast, consumer price indices,...

This paper discusses the case for a money pillar in the European Central Bank's (ECB) monetary policy strategy. Time-series evidence for industrial countries based on frequency-domain and unobserved-components analysis suggests that money can play a useful role in gauging and constraining...

The paper develops an interpretation of volatile exchange rate movements in a dollarized economy with very high rates of inflation. Differences between the rate of inflation and currency depreciation (over- or undershooting of the exchange rate) are seen as a proxy for changes in the relative...

We use a mean-adjusted Bayesian VAR model as an out-of-sample forecasting tool to test whether money growth Granger-causes inflation in the euro area. Based on data from 1970 to 2006 and forecasting horizons of up to 12 quarters, there is surprisingly strong evidence that including money...

The natural interest rate is of great relevance to central banks, but it is difficult to measure. We show that in a standard microfounded monetary model, the natural interest rate co-moves with a transformation of the money demand that can be computed from actual data. The co-movement is of a...

This paper analyzes broad money demand (M2) in Guyana from January 1990 to September 1999; a period marked by deep transformations aimed at shifting Guyana from a centralized to a market economy. The paper develops a stable error-correction model based on a long-run cointegrating vector of money...

This paper uses a two-sector model to estimate the relationship between prices, money, and the exchange rate in Madagascar during the period 1982-2004. The estimated model, using quarterly data, finds a stable long-run relationship among monetary aggregates, domestic prices, real income, and...

In the past decades, much work has been geared toward solving the problem of time inconsistency in monetary policy and analyzing the coordination problem between fiscal and monetary policy. This paper provides a review of the theoretical background to these theories, while also focusing on their...

Zimbabwe has currently the highest rate of inflation in the world (an annual rate of 1,730 percent in February, 2007). The high rates of inflation have contributed to the contraction of the economy, which has declined by about 30 percent since 1999. This paper examines the stabilization...