Inflation targeting offers the promise of introducing to monetary policy a logic and consistency that some central banks' deliberations sorely missed in the past. At least in today's inherited monetary policymaking context, however, inflation targeting also serves two further objectives that are...

This paper considers the implications, for macroeconomic modeling and for monetary policy, of the interrelationships among money, credit and nonfinancial economic activity. Data for the United States since World War II show that the volume of outstanding credit is as closely related to economic...

Using a daily survey of U.S. households, we study how the Federal Reserve's announcement of its new strategy of average inflation targeting affected households' expectations. Starting with the day of the announcement, there is a very small uptick in the minority of households reporting that they...

We study the effects of positive steady-state inflation in New Keynesian models subject to the zero bound on interest rates. We derive the utility-based welfare loss function taking into account the effects of positive steady-state inflation and show that steady-state inflation affects welfare...

This paper characterizes the properties of various interest-rate rules in a basic forward-looking model. We compare simple Taylor rules and rules that respond to price-level fluctuations (called Wicksellian rules). We argue that by introducing an appropriate amount of history dependence in...

This paper characterizes optimal monetary policy for a range of alternative economic models in terms of a flexible inflation targeting rule, with a target criterion that depends on the model specification. It shows which forecast horizons should matter, and which variables besides inflation...

We examine to what extent variants of inflation-forecast targeting can avoid stabilization bias, incorporate history-dependence, and achieve determinancy of equilibrium, so as to reproduce a socially optimal equilibrium. We also evaluate these variants in terms of the transparency of the...