We use a sample of 140 countries to study empirically how a country's characteristics are associated with its choice of an exchange rate regime. When countries are classified according to their current exchange rate arrangements, we observe that small countries with low diversification of...

We analyze a monetary model with flexible labor supply, cash-inadvance constraints and seigniorage-financed government deficits. If the intertemporal elasticity of substitution of labor is greater than one, there are two steady states, one determinate and the other indeterminate. If the...

Earlier studies of the seigniorage inflation model have found that the high-inflation steady state is not stable under adaptive learning. We reconsider this issue and analyze the full set of solutions for the linearized model. Our main focus is on stationary hyperinflationary paths near the...

Expectations about the future are central for determination of current macroeconomic outcomes and the formulation of monetary policy. Recent literature has explored ways for supplementing the benchmark of rational expectations with explicit models of expectations formation that rely on...

Recent models of monetary policy can have indeterminacy of equilibria. The indeterminacy property is often viewed as a difficulty of these models. We consider its significance using the learning approach to expectations formation by employing expectational stability as a robustness criterion for...

A fundamentals-based monetary policy rule, which would be the optimal monetary policy without commitment when private agents have perfectly rational expectations, is unstable if in fact these agents follow standard adaptive learning rules. This problem can be overcome if private expectations are...

Recent models of monetary policy have analyzed the desirability of di?erent optimal and ad hoc interest rules under the restrictive assumption that forecasts of the private sector and the central bank are homogenous. This paper studies the implications of heterogeneity in forecasting by the...

Commitment in monetary policy leads to equilibria that are superior to those from optimal discretionary policies. A number of interest rate reaction functions and instrument rules have been proposed to implement or approximate commitment policy. We assess these optimal reaction functions and...

We review the recent work on interest rate setting, which emphasizes the desirability of designing policy to ensure stability under learning. Appropriately designed expectations-based rules can yield optimal rational expectations equilibria that are both determinate and stable under learning....

We investigate both the rational explosive inflation paths studied by (McCallum 2001), and the classification of fiscal and monetary polices proposed by (Leeper 1991), for stability under learning of the rational expectations equilibria (REE). Our first result is that the fiscalist REE in the...