Bolivia has achieved noteworthy success over the past 15 years in raising incomes, reducing poverty, and maintaining macroeconomic stability by deploying commodity revenues to finance transfers, public investment, and state-led development, using an exchange rate peg as a policy anchor. However,...

We study the optimal design of a disinflation plan by a planner who lacks commitment. Having announced a plan, the Central banker faces a tradeoff between surprise inflation and building reputation, defined as the private sector's belief that the Central bank is committed to the plan. Some plans...

This paper examines the policy challenges a country faces when it wants to both reduce inflation and maintain a sustainable external position. Mundell's (1962) policy assignment framework suggests that these two goals may be mutually incompatible unless monetary and fiscal policies are properly...

Understanding the sources of inflation persistence is crucial for monetary policy. This paper provides an empirical assessment of the influence of inflation expectations' anchoring on the persistence of inflation. We construct a novel index of inflation expectations' anchoring using survey-based...

Is backward-looking behavior in pricing or imperfect credibility of stabilization efforts responsible for the failure of inflation rates to decline to targeted levels during many disinflation programs? This paper assesses the relative importance of these two factors during a number of...

Complementing the explanation provided by Calvo and Vegh (1994) for money-based stabilization programs, exchange rate uncertainty introduced to a particular version of the portfolio approach with imperfect competition in the banking system leads to a bias toward appreciation that is directly...

Although few would doubt that very high inflation is bad for growth, there is much less agreement about moderate inflation’s effects. Using panel regressions and a nonlinear specification, this paper finds a statistically and economically significant negative relationship between inflation and...

Do exchange-rate-based stabilizations generate distinctive economic dynamics? To address this question, this paper identifies stabilization episodes using criteria that differ from those in previous empirical studies of exchange-rate-based stabilizations. We find that, while some differences can...

In response to high and chronic inflation, countries have adopted different stabilization policies. However, the extent to which these stabilization programs were designed for political motives is not clear. Since exchange-rate-based stabilizations (ERBS) create an initial consumption boom...

This paper examines the welfare effects of mitigating the costs of inflation. In a simple model where money reduces transaction costs, a fall in the costs of inflation is equivalent to financial innovation. This can be caused by paying interest on deposits, indexing money, or “dollarizing.”...