Monetary policy has fiscal implications that are especially pronounced at the zero lower bound. Independent central banks in advanced economies have considerable leeway to ease fiscal pressures faced by governments without compromising price stability. They also have the power to create...

This paper employs stochastic simulations of a small structural rational expectations model to investigate the consequences of the zero bound on nominal interest rates. We find that if the economy is subject to stochastic shocks similar in magnitude to those experienced in the U.S. over the...

The Federal Reserve's muddled mandate to attain simultaneously the incompatible goals of maximum employment and price stability invites short-term-oriented discretionary policymaking inconsistent with the systematic approach needed for monetary policy to contribute best to the economy over time....

A burgeoning part of the monetary policy design literature posits that optimal monetary policy is the solution to a constrained optimization problem where the monetary authority has the discretion to minimize a social welfare function, taking the economy and other policies as given. Davig and...

The monetary policy of the ECB and the Fed over the past few years are compared and contrasted. The two central banks have similar price stability objectives and faced similar conditions early in the crisis, including the zero bound on short-term interest rates. Since mid-2012, their policies...

This paper reports the results of a survey of former members of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank, which sought their views on monetary policy communication practices, the related challenges and the road ahead. Pronounced differences across the respondent groups are rare,...

Inflation targeting is implemented in different ways - most often by adopting point targets, by having tolerance bands around a point target, or by specifying target ranges. Using data for 20 economies, this paper tests whether the various target types affect the anchoring of inflation...

Central banks have intensified their communication with non-experts - an endeavour which some have argued is bound to fail. This paper studies English and German Twitter traffic about the ECB to understand whether its communication is received by non-experts and how it affects their views. It...

Monetary policy communication is particularly important during unconventional times, because high uncertainty about the economy, the introduction of new policy tools and possible limits to the central bank 's toolkit could hamper the predictability of policy actions. We study how monetary policy...

Since the beginning of the crisis, euro area governments have experienced greater fiscal stress than governments of advanced economies outside the euro area with weaker fiscal fundamentals. What has been the source of this fragility and how can it be corrected? The cause of the instability in...