This paper assumes that a central bank commits itself to maintaining an inflation target and then asks what measure of the inflation rate the central bank should use if it wants to maximize economic stability. The paper first formalizes this problem and examines its microeconomic foundations. It...

Analysis of quantitative easing (QE) typically focus on the recent past studying the policy's effectiveness during a financial crisis when nominal interest rates are zero. This paper examines instead the usefulness of QE in a future fiscal crisis, modeled as a situation where the fiscal outlook...

The onset of the US credit crisis in 2008, and its rapid globalization induced the FED to extend unprecedented swap-lines of 30 billion dollars to four emerging markets, and the proliferation of other cross-countries selective swap arrangements. This paper explores the logic for these...

Policy rules that are consistent with inflation targeting are examined in a small macroeconomic model of the US economy. We compare the properties and outcomes of explicit instrument rules' as well as targeting rules.' The latter, which imply implicit instrument rules, may be closer to actual...

Previous analysis of the implementation of inflation targeting is extended to monetary policy responses to different shocks, consequences of model uncertainty, effects of interest rate smoothing and stabilization, a comparison with nominal GDP targeting, and implications of forward-looking...

Inflation targeting is shown to imply inflation forecast targeting: the central bank's inflation forecast becomes an explicit intermediate target. Inflation forecast targeting simplifies both implementation and monitoring of monetary policy. The weight on output stabilization determines how...