This paper demonstrates how a target for money growth can be beneficial for an inflation targeting central bank acting under discretion. Because the growth rate of money is closely related to the change in the interest rate and he growth of real output, delegating a money growth target to the...

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...

Monetary policy is often analysed in terms of simple rules. Such rules may be useful for many purposes, even when they do not describe the actual monetary policy strategy exactly. This paper compares monetary policy in Sweden during the inflation-targeting regime 19932002 with the policies...

This paper discusses how monetary policy in Sweden has evolved since 1973. We provide a chronology of the different monetary policy regimes in place during the past fifty years and identify two main regimes, the pegged-but-adjustable exchange rate regime (1973 - 1992) and the inflation targeting...

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...

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 use of explicit inflation targets has meant that monetary policy has become more transparent and also easier to evaluate. The analysis in this paper is based on forecasts by Sveriges Riksbank (the central bank of Sweden) on real output and inflation. Our purpose is to separate the effects on...