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 specifies a new convenient algorithm to construct policy projections conditional on alternative anticipated policy-rate paths in linearized dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, such as Ramses, the Riksbank's main DSGE model. Such projections with anticipated...

In recent years, activist monetary policy rules responding to inflation and the level of economic activity have been advanced as a means of achieving effective output stabilization without inflation. Advocates of such policies suggest that their flexibility may yield substantial stabilization...

The discursive dilemma implies that the policy decision of a board of policymakers depends on whether the board reaches the decision by voting directly on policy (conclusion-based procedure), or by voting on the premises for the decision (premise-based procedure). We derive results showing when...

This paper argues that assuming a common information set shared by the public and the central bank may be inappropriate when one is concerned with the value of information itself. Specifically, we argue that it may lead one to draw the conclusion that monetary policy do not benefit from accurate...

We develop a New Keynesian model with staggered price and wage setting where downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) arises endogenously through the wage bargaining institutions. It is shown that the optimal (discretionary) monetary policy response to changing economic conditions then becomes...

In this paper, we outline a baseline DSGE model which enables a straightforward analysis of wage bargaining between firms and households/unions in a model with both staggered prices and wages. Relying on empirical evidence, we assume that prices can be changed whenever wages are changed. This...

This paper examines a price-level target in a model with a forward-looking Calvo-Taylor Phillips curve. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is found that price-level targeting leads to a better trade-off between inflation and output-gap variability than inflation targeting, when the central bank...