It has been argued that the effect of a change in the monetary policy interest rate on aggregate demand may be larger at higher levels of indebtedness through its impact on cash flows. However, the extent of credit constraints may be at least as important, if not more so. In particular, monetary...

Expectations of the future play a key role in the transmission of monetary policy. Over recent years, a lot of theoretical and applied macroeconomic research has been based on the assumption of rational expectations. However, estimated models based on this assumption typically fail to capture...

This paper investigates the merits of aggregate inflation targeting compared with non-traded inflation targeting using a model of a small open economy producing traded and non-traded goods. An important innovation of our approach is that we isolate the effects of exchange rate, supply and demand...

This paper examines the sources of Australia’s business cycle fluctuations. The cyclical component of GDP is extracted using the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition and a structural VAR model is identified using robust sign restrictions derived from a small open economy model. In contrast to...

This paper examines optimal monetary policy in an open-economy two-country model with sticky prices. Currency misalignments are shown to be inefficient and lower world welfare. Also, optimal policy must target not only inflation and the output gap, but also the currency misalignment. However,...

Several recent papers have explored the possibility that inflation-targeting central banks in small open economies pay too much attention to exchange rate fluctuations; changing short-term interest rates in response to fluctuations that have transient effects on inflation could be...

This paper examines the choice of a monetary policy rule in a simple macroeconomic model. In a closed economy, the optimal policy is a ‘Taylor rule’ in which the interest rate depends on output and inflation. In an open economy, the optimal rule changes in two ways. First, the policy...

Long-term nominal interest rates in a number of inflation-targeting small open economies have tended to be highly correlated with those of the United States. This observation has recently lent support to the view that the long end of the yield curve is determined abroad. We set up and estimate a...

The rational expectations equilibrium of a small open economy can be subject to indeterminacy if foreign monetary policy does not satisfy the Taylor principle. We study the implications of foreign-induced indeterminacy for the conduct of monetary policy in a small open economy. In the canonical...

Different approaches to modelling the macroeconomy vary in the emphasis they place on coherence with theory relative to their ability to match the data. Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models place greater emphasis on theory, while vector autoregression (VAR) models tend to provide...