In September 1931, Sweden became the first country to make the stabilization of the domestic price level the official goal of its monetary policy, actually the only country that so far has adopted such an explicit price level target. Starting from the issues and concepts familiar from research...

The recent debate over monetary policy strategies concludes that monetary targeting and inflation targeting in practice lead to very similar patterns of central bank behavior. This raises the question why central banks insist on the strategies they use. In this paper, we develop an answer from...

This paper examines the implications of recent research on monetary policy rules for practical monetary policy making, with special emphasis on strategies for setting interest rates by the new European Central Bank (ECB). The paper draws on recent research and new simulations of a large open...

This paper describes the official Riksbank forecasts for the period 2000-06. The forecast variables are those that are important for monetary policy analysis, i.e. inflation, GDP, productivity, employment, labour force, unemployment and financial variables such as interest rate and foreign...

When generating conditional forecasts in dynamic models it is common to impose the conditions as restrictions on future structural shocks. However, these conditional forecasts often ignore that there may be uncertainty about the future development of the restricted variables. Our paper therefore...

The interest in empirical studies of monetary policy has increased in the last decade. The deregulation of financial markets and the increased use of explicit policy rules and targets have made monetary policy more transparent and interesting for economic analysis. This paper demonstrates how a...

Using stochastic simulations of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s macroeconomic model, this paper examines the implications for monetary policy of uncertainty about the length of the monetary policy transmission lag. Uncertainty is examined from two perspectives. The first investigates the...

This paper analyses the role of financial variables in the conduct of monetary policy. In the baseline model for the analysis of interest rules, the inflation rate depends on the output gap, which is solely determined by its own lags and the lagged short-term real interest rate. However, from a...

In this paper we discuss the recent experience of conducting monetary policy with a collegial board according to the Riksbank act. Interest rate decisions are normally taken with the aim to bring inflation in line with the 2 per cent inflation target one to two years ahead. When there are...