Central banks are increasingly reaching out to the general public to motivate and explain their monetary policy actions. One major aim of this outreach is to guide inflation expectations; another is to ensure accountability and create trust. This article surveys a rapidly-growing literature on...

Nowadays, it is widely believed that greater disclosure and clarity over policy may lead to greater predictability of central bank actions. We examine whether communication by the European Central Bank (ECB) adds information compared to the information provided by a Taylor rule model in which...

This paper extends a small linear model of the Israeli economy to allow for nonlinearities in the inflation-output process that arise from convexity in the Phillips curve and endogenous monetary policy credibility. We find that the dynamic responses to shocks in the extended model more closely...

Researchers in policymaking institutions have expended significant effort to develop a new generation of macro models with more rigorous microfoundations. This paper provides a summary of the applications of two of these models. The Global Economy Model is a quarterly model that features a large...

This paper documents the specification of a model that was constructed to assess debt sustainability in emerging market economies. Key features of the model include external and fiscal sectors, which allow assessment of external and public debt in a unified framework; public and external debt,...

This paper motivates and describes an approach to forecasting and monetary policy analysis based on the use of a simple structural macroeconomic model, along the lines of those in use in a number of central banks. It contrasts this approach with financial programming and its emphasis on monetary...

Over the past two years, the IMF staff has been developing a new multicountry macroeconomic model called the Global Economy Model (GEM). This paper explains why such a model is needed, how GEM differs from its predecessor model, and how the new features of the model can improve the IMF’s...

This paper provides a how-to guide to model-based forecasting and monetary policy analysis. It describes a simple structural model, along the lines of those in use in a number of central banks. This workhorse model consists of an aggregate demand (or IS) curve, a price-setting (or Phillips)...