The last decade has seen a burst of micro price studies. Many studies analyze data underlying national CPIs and PPIs. Others focus on more granular subnational grocery store data. We review these studies with an eye toward the role of price setting in business cycles. We summarize with ten...

This paper compares the performance of economies with different monetary regimes during the last quarter century. The conclusions include: (1) There is little evidence that inflation targeting affects performance in advanced economies, but some evidence of benefits in emerging economies; (2)...

Inflation targeting is a monetary-policy strategy characterized by an announced numerical inflation target, an implementation of monetary policy that gives a major role to an inflation forecast that has been called forecast targeting, and a high degree of transparency and accountability. It was...

This chapter investigates the implications of adaptive learning in the private sector's formation of inflation expectations for the conduct of monetary policy. We first review the literature that studies the implications of adaptive learning processes for macroeconomic dynamics under various...

Our chapter reviews positive and normative issues in the interaction between monetary and fiscal policy, with an emphasis on how views on policy coordination have changed over the last 25 five years. On the positive side, noncooperative games between a government and its central bank have given...

This chapter studies optimal monetary stabilization policy in interdependent open economies, by proposing a unified analytical framework systematizing the existing literature. In the model, the combination of complete exchange-rate pass-through (producer currency pricing) and frictionless asset...

This chapter reviews the theory of optimal monetary stabilization policy in New Keynesian models, with particular emphasis on developments since the treatment of this topic in Woodford (2003). The primary emphasis of the chapter is on methods of analysis that are useful in this area, rather than...

Observed inflation targets around the industrial world are concentrated at two percent per year. This chapter investigates the extent to which the observed magnitudes of inflation targets are consistent with the optimal rate of inflation predicted by leading theories of monetary non-neutrality....

We reconsider the role of financial intermediaries in monetary economics, and explore the hypothesis that the financial intermediary sector is the engine that drives the financial cycle through fluctuations in the price of risk. In this framework, balance sheet quantities emerge as a key...

We develop a canonical framework to think about credit market frictions and aggregate economic activity in the context of the current crisis. We use the framework to address two issues in particular: first, how disruptions in financial intermediation can induce a crisis that affects real...