Monetary economics as practiced by central bank modelers has made a great deal of progress in recent years. In a 2002 paper I interviewed research economists at four central banks and surveyed the models in use at those banks. I criticized the models for having lost all touch with statistical...

This paper examines the behaviour of exchange rate pass-through to domestic prices in India during the post-economic reforms initiated since the major devaluation of July 1991. It observes that there is no clear-cut evidence of a fall in exchange rate pass-through to domestic prices. Further,...

This paper reviews analytical work carried out by central banks that participated in the Autumn Meeting of Central Bank Economists on The evolving inflation process which the BIS hosted on 28-29 October 2005. The paper first discusses efforts to document the univariate statistical properties of...

We propose a regime-switching approach to deal with the lower bound on nominal interest rates in dynamic term structure modelling. In the "lower bound regime", the short term rate is expected to remain constant at levels close to the effective lower bound; in the "normal regime", the short rate...

Assigning a discretionary central bank a mandate to stabilize an average inflation rate - rather than a period-by-period inflation rate - increases welfare in a New Keynesian model with an occasionally binding lower bound on nominal interest rates. Under rational expectations, the...

This paper examines the nature of the pass-through of exchange rate shocks on prices along the distribution chain, and estimates its short and long-term path. It uses monthly data from a small open economy and a smooth transition auto-regressive vector model estimated by Bayesian methods. The...

Informality is an entrenched structural trait in emerging market economies, despite of the progress achieved in macroeconomic management. Informality determines the behavior of labour markets, financial access and the productivity of the overall economy. Therefore it influences the transmission...

Central banks' announcements that rates are expected to remain low could signal either a weak macroeconomic outlook, which would slow expenditures, or a more accommodative stance, which may stimulate economic activity. We use the Survey of Professional Forecasters to show that, when the Fed gave...

Beginning with the global financial crisis (2008) the correlation between crude oil prices and medium-term and forward inflation expectations increased leading to fears of their un-anchoring. Using the first principal component of commodity prices as a measure for global aggregate demand, we...

Demographic shifts, such as population ageing, have been suggested as possible explanations for the past decade's low inflation. We exploit cross-country variation in a long panel to identify age structure effects in inflation, controlling for standard monetary factors. A robust relationship...