Summarizing Hendry's forty years of work on taming uncertainty is "clear and distinct": Test, test, test. Sure - but test what? Test the maintained assumptions of the disturbances. Test the parameter restrictions of a given model. Test the explanatory power of a model against a rival model. In...

We offer a novel methodology for assessing the quality of inflation reports. In contrast to the existing literature, which mostly evaluates the formal quality of these reports, we evaluate their economic content by comparing inflation factors reported by the central banks with ex-post...

This paper focuses on the issue of the information asymmetry between the Federal Reserve Bank and commercial forecasters. Previous theoretical and empirical evidence suggest that in the absence of confidential supervisory information, commercial forecasters either under- or over- predict future...

When inflation picks up, central banks are most concerned that the de-anchoring of inflation expectations and the ignition of wage-price spirals will trigger inflation dynamic instability. However, such scenarios do not materialize in the standard New Keynesian theoretical framework for monetary...

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...

Recent research has found that macroeconomic survey forecasts of uncertainty exhibit several deficiencies, such as horizon-dependent biases and lower accuracy than simple unconditional uncertainty forecasts. We examine the inflation uncertainty forecasts from the Bank of England, the Banco...

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,...

Recent research has found that macroeconomic survey forecasts of uncertainty exhibit several deficiencies, such as horizon-dependent biases and lower accuracy than simple unconditional uncertainty forecasts. We examine the inflation uncertainty forecasts from the Bank of England, the Banco...

Trend inflation estimates for 12 of the largest Asian economies over 1995-2018 offer important insights on inflation dynamics and inflation expectations. The disinflationary shocks that hit the region since 2014 were partly transitory, but their effects have been different depending on the...

This paper investigates the forward-lookingness of monetary policy related to stabilising inflation over time under different degrees of central bank credibility in the four largest Latin American economies, which experienced a different transition path to the full-fledged inflation targeting...