Some studies argue that the Fed reacts to financial market developments. Using data covering the period 1985:Q1 - 2008:Q4 and employing an augmented Taylor rule specification, we re-examine that conjecture. We find that evidence in favour of such a reaction is largely driven by the Fed’s...

The paper investigates the impacts of the volatility of monetary policy on the economy in a DSGE model with financial frictions a la Bernanke, Gertler, and Gilchrist (1999). The model is estimated by the particle filter maximum likelihood estimator for the U.S. economy. Our results first show...

This investigation aims to explain and quantify the deviations of the Taylor Rule. A novel three-step econometric procedure designed to reflect the data-rich environment in which central banks operate is proposed using information for 229 macroeconomic series. This procedure can be applied to...

The global financial crisis has reaffirmed the importance of financial factors for macroeconomic fluctuations. Recent work has shown how the conventional pre-crisis prescription that monetary policy should pay no attention to financial variables over and above their effects on inflation may no...

In this paper we analyze whether the current macroeconomic environment in India is suitable for implementation of inflation targeting as a monetary policy strategy, in light of the recommendation of the Urjit Patel Committee Report. Our results indicate that historically the Reserve Bank of...

This paper investigates whether the seemingly discretionary and flexible approach of the Reserve Bank of India can in practice be described by a Taylor-type rule. It estimates an exchange-rate-augmented Taylor rule for India over the period Quarter 1 of 1980 to Quarter 4 of 2008. It investigates...

This paper presents a brief description of the operation of Brazil's Inflation Targeting regime, and an evaluation of its performance since its introduction in June 1999 until 2006.The performance of the regime is evaluated comparing the observed inflation values with the officially announced...

During the Bretton Woods era, balance-of-payments developments, gold losses, and exchange rate concerns had little influence on Federal Reserve monetary policy, even after 1958 when such issues became critical. The Federal Reserve could largely disregard international considerations because the...

In a simple New Keynesian model, we derive a closed form solution for the inflation-gap persistence parameter as a function of the policy weights in the central bank’s Taylor rule. By estimating the time-varying weights that the FED attaches to inflation and the output gap, we show that the...

We estimate a small-scale macro model for the Mexican economy under the New Keynesian (NK) framework and alternative interest rate rules for Mexico. With these results we evaluate the performance of the Bank of Mexico against a set of optimality principles derived in the NK literature. Our...