In September 1931, Sweden became the first country to make the stabilization of the domestic price level the official goal of its monetary policy, actually the only country that so far has adopted such an explicit price level target. Starting from the issues and concepts familiar from research...

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

In this paper key points in the development of the present Swedish inflation-targeting strategy are analysed. Since the implementation of the inflation target strategy began in 1993, three different phases are distinguished: the establishment of the inflation target, the communication of...

This paper examines a price-level target in a model with a forward-looking Calvo-Taylor Phillips curve. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is found that price-level targeting leads to a better trade-off between inflation and output-gap variability than inflation targeting, when the central bank...

In this paper we investigate the problem of selecting an optimal horizon for inflation targeting in the United Kingdom. Since there are two key ways of thinking about an optimal horizon, we look at optimal horizons for both of these interpretations. In addition, to see whether our results are...

A central bank pursuing the policy of inflation targeting aims to keep inflation as close as possible to a pre-announced value. But which 'inflation' should this be? Quarterly, annual, biennial? In theoretical models it is typically inflation during one period. We analyze how changing the period...