We study monetary policy delegation in a framework where fiscal policy is determined endogenously and wages are negotiated by trade unions who face a trade-off between real wages and employment.If the median trade union voter is a senior member the nominal wages are too high to guarantee full...

Price level targeting has been proposed as an alternative to inflation targeting that may confer benefits if a central bank sets policy under discretion, even if societyu0092s loss function is specified in terms of inflation (instead of price level) volatility. This paper demonstrates the...

This paper offers an alternative explanation for the behavior of postwar US inflation by measuring a novel source of monetary policy time-inconsistency due to Cukierman (2002). In the presence of asymmetric preferences, the monetary authorities end up generating a systematic inflation bias...

This study analyzes international monetary policy cooperation in a twocountry dynamic general equilibrium model with nominal rigidities, monopolistic competition and producer currency pricing. A quadratic approximation to the utility of the consumers is derived and assumed as the policy...

The presence of a lower bound of zero on nominal interest rates has important implications for the conduct of optimal monetary policy. Standard rational expectations models can have alternative steady states as well as non-unique laws of motion, i.e. there can be possible sunspot equilibria....

Announcing a quantitative objective for price developments has become a common practice in modern monetary policy making. While the specific features of such announced objectives vary across countries, a common rationale for this is to help anchoring inflation expectations. We use survey data on...

This paper employs stochastic simulations of a small structural rational expectations model to investigate the consequences of the zero bound on nominal interest rates. We find that if the economy is subject to stochastic shocks similar in magnitude to those experienced in the U.S. over the...

The paper first describes how the Czech National Bank (CNB) moved gradually from a fixed exchange rate regime to the frontiers of Inflation-Forecast Targeting. It then focuses on the CNB’s recent experience in adding the exchange rate as a complementary monetary policy tool to stimulate...

In 1991, the rate of inflation in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland was between 35% and 70%. At the end of 2001, it is below 8%. We setup a small structural macro model of these economies to explain the process of disinflation. Contrary to a widespread skepticism, which permeated a large...

The ECB has been arguing in the past that since there is no trade-off between price stability and financial stability, the pursuit of price stability is the best a central bank can do to also maintain financial stability. We argue that there is a potential trade-off between price stability and...