We examine the conduct of monetary policy in a world where the supply of outside money is controlled by the fiscal authority-a scenario increasingly relevant for many developed economies today. Central bank control over the long-run inflation rate depends on whether fiscal policy is Ricardian or...

After decades using monetary aggregates as the main instrument of monetary policy and having different varieties of crawling peg exchange rate regimes, Colombia adopted a full-fledged inflation-targeting (IT) regime in 1999, with inflation as the nominal anchor, a floating exchange rate, and the...

Keynes’ original intention in introducing the concept of a liquidity trap was to explain the reason why persistent large amounts of unutilized resources were generated during the Great Depression. This paper shows that this type of phenomenon cannot be explained in the framework of a...

The standard new Keynesian monetary policy problem is, in its original presentation, a linear model. As a result, only three possibilities are admissible in terms of long term dynamics: the equilibrium may be a stable node, an unstable node or a saddle point. Fixed point stability (a stable...

There is widespread agreement that monetary policy should be evaluated by using forward-looking Taylor rules estimated with real-time data. For the case of the U.S., this analysis can be performed using Greenbook data, but only through 2002. In countries outside the U.S., central banks do not...

This paper analyzes the implementation of Fiscal Rules (FR) in Argentina. Several clear attempts to establish a FR at the national level are identified. The analysis suggests that the environment matters. The only FR that was binding in the period was approved in 2004 during an economic boom,...

We show that some types of fiscal rules can mitigate the well-known procyclical bias in public capital expenditures. Past research has found that fiscal adjustment episodes coincide with large public investment cuts, a pattern we also document in a sample of 75 advanced and emerging economies...

As is well known in systems theory, the parameter space of most dynamic models is stratified into subsets, each of which supports a different kind of dynamic solution. Since we do not know the parameters with certainty, knowledge of the location of the bifurcation boundaries is of fundamental...

This paper explores three areas in which the experience of the Great Depression might be relevant today: monetary policy, fiscal policy and the systemic stability of the banking system. We confirm the consensus on monetary policy: deflation must be avoided. With regard to fiscal policy, the...

This paper provides a theory of the international business cycle grounded on firms' entry and sticky prices. It shows that under simple monetary rules pro-cyclical entry and counter-cyclical markups can generate fluctuations in macroeconomic aggregates and trade variables as large as those...