Yes, it makes a lot of sense. Using the Smets and Wouters (2007) model of the U.S. economy, we find that the role of the output gap should be equal to or even more important than that of inflation when designing a simple loss function to represent household welfare. Moreover, we document that a...

Variable and high rates of price inflation in the 1970s and 1980s led many countries to delegate the conduct of monetary policy to "instrument-independent" central banks and to give their central banks a clear mandate to pursue price stability and instrument independence to achieve it. Advances...

This paper proposes a method and a toolkit for solving optimal policy with imperfect commitment in linear quadratic models. As opposed to the existing literature, our method can be employed in medium- and large-scale models typically used in monetary policy. We apply our method to the Smets and...

This paper analyzes how monetary policy in an overlapping generations model can be designed to avoid inflationary consequences of anticipated changes of monetary policies. Avoiding these inflationary consequences will require a once and for all increase (decrease) in monetary growth immediately...

A bivariate vector-autoregression (VAR) model is used to test causal relations between the current account and the capital account in four emerging market economies. The results show that high capital mobility could be a major cause of current account instability. Therefore, macroeconomic policy...

We demonstrate how the methodology of value-based generational accounting reveals the position of various generations for any institutional arrangement sharing revenues and losses with current and future generations. The illustration in this chapter is based on a stand-alone pension fund with...

We find that between 20 and 25 percent of the negative covariance between excess returns and inflation is explained by shocks to monetary policy variables. The finding is robust to changes in the monetary policy rule that have occurred during the 1966-2000 period. The result contradicts the...

This paper analyses the relationship between financial stress indicator variables and monetary policy in South Africa with emphasis on how robust these variables are related to the monetary policy interest rate. The financial stress indicator variables comprise a set of variables from the main...

This study assesses the behaviour of credit extension over the economic cycle to determine its usefulness as a reference guide for implementing the countercyclical capital buffers for financial institutions in South Africa. The study finds that the common reference guide for implementing the...

This paper analyses the link between discretionary fiscal policy and output growth in ten CEE countries. Three aspects are considered: cyclical pattern in the fiscal discretion, contributions to GDP growth, and the link between policy aggressiveness and output volatility. Fiscal discretion is...