The dramatic improvement in macroeconomic outcomes during the 1990s - stable, low inflation and high, stable growth - can be at least partly ascribed to improved monetary policy. Central banks became more independent and many of them adopted inflation targeting. This paper examines the potential...

This paper reviews and interprets some of the key policy implications that flow from a class of DSGE models for optimal monetary policy in the open economy. The framework suggests that good macroeconomic outcomes in open economies are possible by focusing inflation targeting that is implemented...

Modern central bankers are the risk managers of the financial system. They take actions based not only on point forecasts for growth and inflation, but based on the entire distribution of possible macroeconomic outcomes. In numerous instances monetary policymakers have acted in ways designed to...

Central bankers and financial supervisors often have different goals. While monetary policymakers want to ensure that there are always sufficient lending activities to maintain high and stable economic growth, supervisors work to limit banks. lending capacities in order to prevent excessive...

We study the international monetary policy design problem within an optimizing two-country sticky price model, where each country faces a short run tradeoff between output and inflation. The model is sufficiently tractable to solve analytically. We find that in the Nash equilibrium, the policy...

This paper develops a new open economy macro model of optimal monetary for a small open economy. Our main result is that in this model, the optimal policy problem for the small open economy is isomorphic to the closed economy case studied in Clarida, Gali, Gertler (1999). In particular, the...

This paper was prepared as a Keynote Address for the ESRC Conference on the Future of Macroeconomics held at the Bank of England Conference Center on April 14, 2000. It uses the empirical framework for formulating and estimating forward looking monetary policy rules developed in Clarida, Gali,...

This paper discusses how optimal monetary policy is affected by differences in the combination of shocks an economy experiences and the rigidities it exhibits. Without both nominal rigidities and economic shocks, monetary policy would be irrelevant. Recognizing this, policymakers increasingly...

This paper reviews the recent literature on monetary policy rules. We exploit the monetary policy design problem within a simple baseline theoretical framework. We then consider the implications of adding various real world complications. Among other things, we show that the optimal policy...

We estimate a forward-looking monetary policy reaction function for the postwar US economy, pre- and post-October 1979. Our results point to substantial differences in the estimated rule across periods. In particular, interest rate policy in the Volcker-Greenspan period appears to have been much...