Latin America's central banks have made substantial progress towards delivering an environment of price stability that is supportive of sustainable economic growth. We review these achievements, and discuss remaining challenges facing central banking in the region. Where inflation remains high...

A long-standing conjecture in macroeconomics is that recent declines in exchange rate pass-through are in part due to improved monetary policy performance. In a large sample of emerging and advanced economies, we find evidence of a strong link between exchange rate pass-through to consumer...

We estimate the determinants of disagreement about future inflation in a large and diversesample of countries, focusing on the role of monetary policy frameworks. We offer novelinsights that allow us to reconcile mixed findings in the literature on the benefits of inflationtargeting regimes and...

We study optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a New Keynesian model where occasional declines in agents' confidence give rise to persistent liquidity trap episodes. There is no straightforward recipe for enhancing welfare in this economy. Raising the inflation target or appointing an...

Even when the policy rate is currently not constrained by its effective lower bound (ELB), the possibility that the policy rate will become constrained in the future lowers today's inflation by creating tail risk in future inflation and thus reducing expected inflation. In an empirically rich...

As the Federal Reserve continues to normalize its monetary policy, this paper studies the impact of U.S. interest rates on rates in other countries. We find a modest but nontrivial pass-through from U.S. to domestic short-term interest rates on average. We show that, to a large extent, this...

Is the Mundell-Fleming trilemma alive and well? International co-movement of asset prices takes place along side synchronized business cycles, complicating the identification of financial spillovers and assessments of monetary policy autonomy. A benchmark for interest rate co-movement is to...

This paper recounts Chile's experience with capital account policies since the 1990s. We present how two external shocks were confronted under very different macroeconomic and capital account frameworks. We show that during the 1997-98 Asian-LTCM-Russia crisis, a closed capital account and...

Modifying the objective function of a discretionary central bank to include an interest-rate smoothing objective increases the welfare of an economy in which large contractionary shocks occasionally force the central bank to lower the policy rate to its effective lower bound. The central bank...