This paper investigates how institutional constraints discipline the behavior of discretionary governments subject to an expenditure bias. The focus is on constraints implemented in actual economies: monetary policy targets, limits on the deficit and debt ceilings. For a variety of aggregate...

The design of monetary policy depends upon the targeting strategy adopted by the central bank. This strategy describes a set of policy preferences, which are actually the structural parameters to analyse monetary policy making. Accordingly, we develop a novel calibration method to identify...

Using US data, we estimate optimal policy with a probability below one that the Fed reneges on its commitment ("limited credibility") versus discretionary policy where the Fed reneges on its commitment at all periods with a probability equal to one ("zero credibility"). The transmission...

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...

This paper analyzes the time-varying degree of inflation expectations anchoring in Bolivia and, more precisely, whether inflation expectations have been in line with the inflation objectives announced by the Central Bank of Bolivia (BCB, for its acronym in Spanish) and if they have become better...

Societies often rely on simple rules to restrict the size and behavior of governments. When fiscal and monetary policies are conducted by a discretionary and profligate government, I find that revenue ceilings vastly outperform debt, deficit and monetary rules, both in effectiveness at curbing...

Central banks have usually employed short-term rates as the main instrument of monetary policy. In the last decades, however, forward guidance has also become a central tool for monetary policy. In an innovative way this paper combines two sources of extraneous information - high frequency...

Violations of Tinbergen's Rule and strategic interaction undermine monetary and financial policies significantly in a New Keynesian model with the Bernanke-Gertler accelerator. Welfare costs of risk shocks are large because of efficiency losses and income effects of costly monitoring, but they...