In a simple macromodel with forward-looking expectations, this Paper looks into disclosure policy when a central bank has private information on future shocks. The main result is that advance disclosure of forecasts of future shocks does not improve welfare, and in some cases is not desirable as...

The paper discusses several issues related to how monetary policy should be conducted in an era of price stability. Low inflation (with base drift in the price level) and price-level stability (without such base drift) are compared, and a suitable loss function (corresponding to flexible...

This paper studies the shift in the role of monetary policy in Latin America during the 1990s. As in most industrial economies, in Latin America there has been a refocusing of the objectives pursued by monetary policy towards the achievement of price stab

We study the effects of optimized monetary policy in a semi-structural, estimated small open economy in situations where the policymaker has either complete or less than complete confidence in the model being free from misspecification errors. We use the robust control techniques developed by...

The recent debate over monetary policy strategies concludes that monetary targeting in practice lead to very similar patterns of central bank behaviour. This raises the question why central banks insist on the strategies they use. In this paper, we develop an answer from political economy. After...

We use Bayesian methods to estimate the preferences of the US Federal Reserve by assuming that monetary policy is performed optimally under commitment since the mid-sixties. For this purpose, we distinguish between three subperiods, i.e. the pre-Volcker, the Volcker-Greenspan and the Greenspan...

The so-called P* model is frequently used or referred to in discussions of monetary targeting. This gives the impression that the P* model might provide some rationale for monetary targeting or for the monetary reference value used by the Eurosystem. The P* model implies that inflation is...

This paper discusses how price stability can be defined and how price stability can be maintained in practice. Some lessons for the Eurosystem are also considered. With regard to defining price stability, the choice between price-level stability and low (including zero) inflation and the...

The paper discusses the choice between inflation targeting and monetary targeting as a strategy for the Eurosystem, the actual strategy the Eurosystem announced in the fall of 1998, the framework of the policy decisions appropriate for achieving the goals of the Eurosystem, the role of the...

Within a New Keynesian model subject to misspecification, we examine the quadratic contracts in a delegation framework where government and private agents are uncertain about central bank preferences for model robustness. We show that, in the case of complete transparency, the optimal penalty is...