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 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....

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...

Several recent studies imply that the response of national saving to fiscal policy is non-monotonic. In this paper, we use two data sets to search for the circumstances in which such non-monotonic responses arise: one refers to a sample of OECD countries, as in previous studies, and one to a...

Over the last quarter of a century, inflation targeting has become a popular monetary regime. Nevertheless, empirical evaluations of IT have shown contradictory results. Part of the reason is that IT in and of itself constitutes an endogenous decision and thus needs to be properly instrumented....

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...

We construct an empirical test of whether the anticipation of adoption of inflation targeting affects the inflation rate. We observe that most of the central banks adopt the regime after first achieving significant disinflation. With pre-inflation-targeting-disinflation, initial targets are met...

In low-rate environments, policy strategies that involve holding rates "lower for longer" (L4L) may mitigate the effects of the effective lower bound (ELB). However, these strategies work in part by managing the public's expectations, which is not always realistic. Using the Fed's large-scale...

The study discusses central bank’s and government’s behaviour in a small open economy with a strong autonomous monetary policy and fiscal policy restricted by fiscal policy rule. Composed model thus fully corresponds to the Czech reality, where the Czech National Bank’s independency is...

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...