This paper examines the question of whether inflation targeting monetary policy is an appropriate framework for sub-Saharan African countries. The paper presents an overview of inflation targeting, reviews the justification for the regime, and summarizes some major critiques. Monetary policy...

We consider a Diamond-type model of endogenous growth in which there are three assets: fiat money, government bonds, and equity. Because of productivity shocks, the equity return is uncertain, and risk-averse investors require a positive equity premium. Typically, there exist two steady states,...

Past empirical research on monetary policy in open economies has found evidence of the ‘delayed overshooting puzzle’ and the ‘forward discount puzzle’. We revisit the effects of monetary policy on exchange rates by applying Uhlig's [Uhlig, H., 2005a. What are the effects of monetary policy...

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Observers have relied increasingly on simple reaction functions, such as the Taylor rule, to assess the conduct of monetary policy. Applying this approach to deflationary or near-zero inflation environments is problematic, however, and this paper examines two shortcomings of particular relevance...

Did monetary ease in the 1980s cause Japan's bubble, as is often suggested? Drawing on both a new cross-national consideration of the monetary policy-asset price linkage and a re-examination of what actually occurred in Japan 1985-1990, I conclude the bubble was just as likely to occur whatever...

Why do dynamic inconsistencies in monetary policy exist? In this paper we present a traditional model with output inefficiencies, but we allow for monetary policy to be influenced by the various constituencies in the economy, that pressure the Congress to in turn pressure the central bank to...

Modern societies have failed to find affordable ways to fund needed infrastructure. Problems have multiplied from ignoring the particular characteristics of infrastructure and assuming the adequacy of the conventional finance of recent times, be this publicly or privately sourced. These...

This dissertation is a collection of essays with the main objective of estimate and understand macroeconomic behavior of emerging countries by the lenses of modern tools in general equilibrium modeling. In the first chapter, I study whether structural parameters of Small Open Economy Real...

This dissertation computes the optimal monetary and fiscal policy for small open and emerging economies in an estimated medium-scale model. The model departs from the conventional approach as it encompasses all the major nominal and real rigidities normally found in the literature in a single...