High public debt often produces the drama of default and restructuring. But debt is also reduced through financial repression, a tax on bondholders and savers via negative or below market real interest rates. After WWII, capital controls and regulatory restrictions created a captive audience for...

This paper analyses the extent to which financial integration impacts the manner in which terms of trade affect business cycles in emerging economies. Using a s mall open economy model, we show that as capital account openness increases in an economy that faces trade shocks, business cycle...

This paper investigates macroprudential policy effects on bank systemic risk and the role of inflation targeting in such effects. Using bank-level data for 45 countries comprising various monetary and exchange rate regimes, our regime-dependent dynamic panel regression results point to...

This paper proposes a new method of estimating the Taylor rule with a time-varying implicit inflation target and a time-varying natural rate of interest. The inflation target and the natural rate are modeled as random walks and are estimated using maximum likelihood and the Kalman filter. I...

The Bank of Japan has introduced various unconventional monetary policy tools since the launch of Abenomics in 2013, to achieve the price stability target of 2 percent inflation. In this paper, a forward-looking open-economy general equilibrium model with endogenously determined policy...

The form of bounded rationality characterizing the representative agent is key in the choice of the optimal monetary policy regime. While inflation targeting prevails for myopia that distorts agents' inflation expectations, price level targeting emerges as the optimal policy under myopia...

This paper shows that stabilizing volatility in credit growth often conflicts with price stability: unusual credit expansions often occur when inflation is low relative to goals, and credit slumps often appear when inflation is overshooting. We find that central banks with inflation targeting...

In closed or open economy models with complete markets, targeting core inflation enables monetary policy to maximize welfare by replicating the flexible price equilibrium. We analyze this result in the context of developing economies, where a large proportion of households are credit constrained...

This paper describes the CNB's experience implementing an inflation-forecast targeting (IFT) regime, and the building of a system for providing the economic information that policymakers need to implement IFT. The CNB's experience has been very successful in establishing confidence in monetary...

Output gap estimates are subject to a wide range of uncertainty owing to data revisions and the difficulty in distinguishing between cycle and trend in real time. This is important given the central role in monetary policy of assessments of economic activity relative to capacity. We show that...