Modern Money Theory (MMT) has generated considerable scrutiny and discussions over the past decade. While it has gained some acceptance in the financial sector and among some politicians, it has come under strong criticisms from all sides of the academic spectrum and from conservative political...

The worst global downturn since the Great Depression has caused ballooning budget deficits in most nations, as tax revenues collapse and governments bail out financial institutions and attempt countercyclical fiscal policy. With notable exceptions, most economists accept the desirability of...

This paper addresses three issues surrounding monetary policy formation: policy independence, choice of operating targets, and rules versus discretion. According to the New Monetary Consensus, the central bank needs policy independence to build credibility; the operating target is the overnight...

Not since the Great Depression have monetary policy matters and institutions weighed so heavily in commercial, financial, and political arenas. Apart from the eurozone crisis and global monetary policy issues, for nearly two years all else has counted for little more than noise on a relative...

In this paper, I investigate the monetary policy of five industrialized countries which have had explicit inflation targets for more than 15 years. Considering the case of discretionary policy as well as commitment, I estimate two first order conditions. The results support the theory of...

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has recently received significant at- tention in academic and policy circles. Critics question the sustainability of MMT-prescribed approaches to fiscal and monetary policy, especially over extended periods of time, in the presence of international financial markets,...

We employ information-gap decision theory to derive a robust monetary policy response to Knightian parameter uncertainty. This approach provides a quantitative answer to the question: For a specified policy, how much can our models and data err or vary, without rendering the outcome of that...

With sticky prices, optimizing agents and money in the utility function, I derive the exact analytical solution for optimal monetary policy given a zero lower bound (ZLB) on the interest rate. The Phillips curve is Neo-Classical, and the ZLB is then not a constraint on optimal policy. Optimal...

This paper challenges the conventional view according to which disinflations in LAC-even from low and moderate peaks-have been carried out at no cost to output. After suggesting a new methodology that allows for long-lived effects and inflation inertia when measuring costs of disinflations,...

Identifying business cycle stylised facts is essential as these often form the basis for the construction and validation of theoretical business cycle models. Furthermore, understanding the cyclical patterns in economic activity, and their causes, is important to the decisions of both...