During the summer of 2009, Belgium and the euro area, as well as other industrialised countries, recorded negative inflation rates. Although they were the direct result of sharply falling commodity prices in the second half of 2008, policy-makers and the general public wondered whether this...

In the wake of the two longer-term refinancing operations with a maturity of three years conducted in December 2011 and February 2012, amounts placed on the Eurosystem’s deposit facility surged to unprecedented high levels of around € 800 billion. The article clarifies how this high recourse...

After decades using monetary aggregates as the main instrument of monetary policy and having different varieties of crawling peg exchange rate regimes, Colombia adopted a full-fledged inflation-targeting (IT) regime in 1999, with inflation as the nominal anchor, a floating exchange rate, and the...

In this paper, we examine the performance and robustness of optimized interest-rate rules in four models of the euro area that differ considerably in terms of size, degree of aggregation, relevance of forward-looking behavioral elements, and adherence to microfoundations. Our findings are...

This paper investigates the stabilization bias that arises in a model of monetary and fiscal policy stabilization of the economy, when monetary authority puts higher weight on inflation stabilization than society. We demonstrate that inflation conservatism unambiguously leads to social welfare...

The article examines the link between monetary policy and financial stability in the context of the recent financial and economic crisis. It aims to draw lessons from those recent events and to examine the implications for monetary policy. More specifically, it asks whether, apart from its price...

This paper explores the relationship between central bank independence and inflation in Latin America, using as a case study the experience of Colombia (1923-2008). Since its creation, in 1923, Colombia´s central bank has undergone several reforms that have changed its objectives and degree of...

Since the early 1980s, the U.S. economy has changed in some important ways: inflation now rises considerably less when unemployment is low, and the volatility of output and inflation have fallen sharply. This paper examines whether changes in monetary policy can account for these changes in the...

When policy forecasts are based on the policymaker's present and past actions, current policy affects expectations of future policy, contrary to what happens when forecasters can replicate policymaking perfectly. We show that when forecasts are generated through any linear combination of present...

In this paper we adopt a Bayesian approach toward the estimation of monetary policy preference parameters in a general equilibrium framework for the euro area. We assume that monetary policy authorities optimize an intertemporal quadratic loss function under commitment and study two alternative...