Many economists, including former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, believe that the gold standard generates poor economic outcomes including output volatility, price instability, financial panics, the spread of recessions via the exchange rate, and speculation-induced collapse. These problems,...

This paper proposes new measures of the effectiveness of inflation targeting (IT) and evaluates its main drivers in a (large) sample of advanced economies (AEs) and emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). Using synthetic control methods, we find that IT has heterogeneous effects on...

Historically, periods of high indebtedness have been associated with a rising incidence of default or restructuring of public and private debts. A subtle type of debt restructuring takes the form of 'financial repression.' Financial repression includes directed lending to government by captive...

High public debt often produces the drama of default and restructuring. But debt is also reduced through financial repression, a tax on bondholders and savers via negative or below market real interest rates. After WWII, capital controls and regulatory restrictions created a captive audience for...

This paper evaluates on the performance of the inflation-targeting regime in three emerging East-Asian economies that have experienced changes in monetary policy regimes, from rigidities to a flexible exchange rate and inflation targeting, after the financial crisis of 1997-98. In particular,...

Historically, periods of high indebtedness have been associated with a rising incidence of default or restructuring of public and private debts. A subtle type of debt restructuring takes the form of "financial repression." Financial repression includes directed lending to government by captive...

Inflation targeting was adopted by several countries, including Sweden, in the 1990s. We evaluate the Swedish inflation targeting regime since 1995 using a novel approach based on a unique data set on the characteristics of collective wage agreements between 1908 and 2008. First, we establish...

We evaluate the Swedish inflation targeting regime adopted in 1993−1995 using a novel approach based on a unique data set on the characteristics of collective wage agreements between 1908 and 2008. We find that the inflation targeting regime of 1995−2008 stands out as an exceptionally stable...

After decades using monetary aggregates as the main instrument of monetary policy and having different varieties of crawling peg exchange rate regimes, Colombia adopted a full-fledged inflation-targeting (IT) regime in 1999, with inflation as the nominal anchor, a floating exchange rate, and the...