Svensson (2004) suggested that a monetary policy committee of a central bank (MPC) should "find an instrument-rate path such that projections of inflation and output gap 'look good'." Academic literature on monetary policy gives guidance as to what the words "look good" means. However, there is...

We derive four sets of counterfactual national interest rate paths for the 17 Euro Area countries for the time period 1999 to 2012. They approximate desirable national interest rates countries would have liked to implement if they could still conduct independent monetary policy. We find that...

This paper studies the importance of money for inflation in the euro area. An inflation equation is derived from a small model that combines the supply and demand for money with a Phillips curve and the assumption that inflation expectations develop adaptively. The model's solution attributes an...

According to most academics and policymakers, transparency in monetary policymaking is desirable. I examine this proposition in a small theoretical model emphasizing forwardlooking private sector behavior. Transparency makes it easier for price setters to infer the central bank's future policy...

Conventional wisdom says that commitment eliminates the inflationary bias of monetary policy. However, this paper shows that the inflation bias can persist even when the central bank commits. A simple model is presented in which the central bank precommits by setting the policy instrument, and...

We examine optimal and other monetary policies in a linear-quadratic setup with a relatively general form of model uncertainty, so-called Markov jump-linear-quadratic systems extended to include forward-looking variables. The form of model uncertainty our framework encompasses includes : simple...

Evidence on the interdependency between monetary policy and the state of the banking system is scarce. We suggest an integrated micro-macro approach with two core virtues. First, we measure the probability of bank distress directly at the bank level. Second, we integrate a microeconomic hazard...

This paper discusses the role of foreign exchange interventions in the inflation-targeting regime, focusing on the Czech experience since 1998. It concludes that the case for foreign exchange interventions is not clear in an inflation targeting regime both from the theoretical and empirical...

We study the problem of a policymaker who seeks to set policy optimally in an economy where the true economic structure is unobserved, and policymakers optimally learn from their observations of the economy. This is a classic problem of learning and control, variants of which have been studied...

The paper considers optimal monetary stabilization policy in a forward-looking model, when the central bank recognizes that private-sector expectations need not be precisely modelconsistent, and wishes to choose a policy that will be as good as possible in the case of any beliefs that are close...