Central banks worldwide have become more transparent. An important reason is that democratic societies expect more openness from public institutions. Policymakers also see transparency as a way to improve the predictability of monetary policy, thereby lowering interest rate volatility and...

This paper proposes a simple framework for analyzing a continuum of monetary policy rules characterized by differing degrees of credibility, in which commitment and discretion become special cases of what we call quasi commitment. The monetary policy authority is assumed to formulate optimal...

This paper proposes a new procedure for shock identification of macroeconomic forecasts based on factor analysis. Our identification scheme for information shocks relies on data reduction techniques for daily panels and the recognition that macroeconomic releases exhibit a high level of...

This study of the major industrial countries' interbank markets for overnight loans links the behavior of very short-term interest rates to the operating procedures of the countries' central banks. Previous studies have focused on key features of the U.S. federal funds rate's behavior. We find...

This paper analyzes the pass-through from import prices to consumer price index (CPI) inflation in real time. Our strategy follows an event-study approach that compares inflation forecasts before and after import price releases. Inflation forecasts are modeled using a dynamic factor procedure...

The Eurosystem and the U.S. Federal Reserve System follow quite different approaches to the execution of monetary policy. The former institution adopts a hands-off approach that largely delegates to depository institutions the task of stabilizing their own liquidity at high frequency. The latter...

This paper examines the performance of forecast-based nonlinear Taylor rules in a class of simple microfunded models. The paper shows that even if the policy rule leads to a locally determinate (and stable) inflation target, there exist other learnable 'global' equilibria such as cycles and...

We provide a tractable model to study monetary policy under discretion. We restrict our analysis to Markov equilibria. We find that for all parametrizations with an equilibrium inflation rate of about 2 percent, there is a second equilibrium with an inflation rate just above 10 percent. Thus,...

We examine models with spatial separation and limited communication that have shown some promise toward resolving the disparity between theory and practice concerning optimal monetary policy; these models suggest that the Friedman rule may not be optimal. We show that intergenerational transfers...

Central bank communication plays an important role in shaping market participants' expectations. This paper studies a simple nonlinear model of monetary policy in which agents have incomplete information about the economic environment. It shows that agents' learning and the dynamics of the...