In recent years a growing consensus has emerged for price stability as the overriding, long-run goal of monetary policy. However, despite this consensus, the following question still remains: how should monetary policy be conducted to achieve the price stability goal? This paper examines the...

The paper extends previous analysis of closed-economy inflation targeting to a small open economy with forward-looking aggregate supply and demand with some microfoundations, and with stylized realistic lags in the different transmission channels for monetary policy. The paper compares targeting...

The paper analyses various mechanism through which monetary union in Euroep may affect unemployment. The focus is on the political incentives for labour-market reform. There will be more reform outside than inside the EMU to the extent that a national inflation bias can be reduced. But if there...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the merits of monetary policy rules that utilize as their principal target variable the level or growth rate of some aggregate reasure of nominal spending, such as nominal GDP, rather than a monetary aggregate or an index of inflation (either alone or in...

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...

Previous analysis of the implementation of inflation targeting is extended to monetary policy responses to different shocks, consequences of model uncertainty, effects of interest rate smoothing and stabilization, a comparison with nominal GDP targeting, and implications of forward-looking...

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 for policy decisions appropriate for achieving the goals of the Eurosystem, the role of exchange...

Inflation targeting is shown to imply inflation forecast targeting : the central bank's inflation forecast becomes an intermediate target. Inflation forecast targeting simplifies both implementaing and monitoring of monetary policy.