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...

Macroeconomic and microeconomic data paint conflicting pictures of price behavior. Macroeconomic data suggest that inflation is inertial. Microeconomic data indicate that firms change prices frequently. We formulate and estimate a model which resolves this apparent micro - macro conflict. Our...

Yes, it makes a lot of sense. This paper studies how to design simple loss functions for central banks, as parsimonious approximations to social welfare. We show, both analytically and quantitatively, that simple loss functions should feature a high weight on measures of economic activity,...