This paper explores the influence of wage and price staggering on monetary persistence. We show that, for plausible parameter values, wage and price staggering are highly complementary in generating monetary persistence. We do so by proposing the new measure "quantitative persistence," after...

Nowadays a considerable amount of information on the behaviour of the economy is readily available, in the form of large datasets of macroeconomic variables. Central bankers can be expected to base their decisions on this very large information set. Yet the academic profession has shown a clear...

This is an extensive survey of worldwide developments in the area of monetary policymaking institutions during the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. In addition the last section discusses current open issues and future challenges. Section 2 reviews the changes that have occurred...

Should one think of zero nominal interest rates as an undesirable liquidity trap or as the desirable Friedman rule? I use three different frameworks to discuss this issue. First, I restate Cole and Kocherlakota's (1998) analysis of Friedman's rule: short run increases in the money stock -...

Inflation targeting has become the monetary policy framework of the nineties. At the other extreme, several central banks have recently adopted key elements of the inflation targeter's toolkit, but at the same time they have made formal declarations that they are not inflation targeters. Such a...

In the new situation with flexible exchange rates, monetary policy in Europe will have to rely more on indicators than previously under fixed rates. One of the potential indicators, the forward interest rate curve, can be used to indicate market expectations of the time-paths of future short...

This paper investigates optimal indexation in the New Keynesian model, when the indexation choice includes the possibility of partial indexation and of varying weights on rational and lagged indexation. It finds that the Calvo contract adjusted for rationally expected indexation under both...

This paper provides a policymaker's perspective on some lessons from the recent financial crisis. It focuses on questions in three areas. First, what lessons can be drawn regarding the institutional framework for monetary policy? Has the experience changed the pre-crisis consensus that monetary...

The use of forward interest rates as a monetary policy indicator is demonstrated, using Sweden between 1992 and 1994 as an example. The forward rates are interpreted as indicating market expectations of the time-path of future interest rates, future inflation rates, and future currency...

Several recent studies imply that the response of national saving to fiscal policy is non-monotonic. In this paper, we use two data sets to search for the circumstances in which such non-monotonic responses arise: one refers to a sample of OECD countries, as in previous studies, and one to a...