This paper provide a large-deviations approximation of the tail distribution of total financial losses on a portfolio consisting of many positions. Applications include the total default losses on a bank portfolio, or the total claims against an insurer. The results may be useful in allocating...

We provide maximum likelihood estimators of term structures of conditional probabilities of corporate default, incorporating the dynamics of firm-specific and macroeconomic covariates. For U.S. Industrial firms, based on over 390,000 firm-months of data spanning 1979 to 2004, the level and shape...

Previous analysis of the implementation of inflation targeting is extended to monetary policy responses to different shocks, consequences of model uncertainty, effects of interest rate smoothing and stabilization, a comparison with nominal GDP targeting, and implications of forward-looking...

Inflation targeting is shown to imply inflation forecast targeting: the central bank's inflation forecast becomes an explicit intermediate target. Inflation forecast targeting simplifies both implementation and monitoring of monetary policy. The weight on output stabilization determines how...