The persistence of large trade and budget imbalances has led to increasing demands for protectionist policies. Despite a substantial theoretical literature there appears to be no empirical literature on the use of tariffs as a macroeconomic policy instrument. This paper fills that gap, using the...

In many countries two decision-making institutions, the government and the central bank, manage fiscal and monetary policy separately. Such decentralization can lead to a change in the optimal inflation-output trade-off. In fact lack of cooperation can result in a change in the position of the...

In their seminal paper, Morris and Shin (2002a) argued that increasing the precision of public information is not always bene.cial to social welfare. Svensson (2005) however has disputed this by saying that although feasible, the conditions for which this was true, were not at all that likely....

We provide a framework for analysing the choice between optimal and robust rules in the presence of paradigm uncertainty in monetary policy. We thus provide for two issues: …rst, we discuss the conditions of uncertainty that render a robust rule a preferable substitute to optimal rules and...

In contrast to previous empirical attempts to examine the effect of increasing central bank transparency on macroeconomic magnitudes, we investigate how the link between inflation and inflation expectations alters with increasing transparency. Our motivation stems from the belief that changes in...

More than a monetary policy strategy, we interpret inflation targeting as a framework for communication. We model monetary policy as an information game between the Bank and private agents. Our analysis shows how the provision of an explicit numerical inflation objective overcomes potential...

Business cycles reflect changes over time in the amount of trade between individuals. In this paper we show that incorporating explicitly intra-temporal gains from trade between individuals into a macroeconomic model can provide new insight into the potential mechanisms driving economic...

Using indirect inference based on a VAR we confront US data from 1972 to 2007 with a standard New Keynesian model in which an optimal timeless policy is substituted for a Taylor rule. We find the model explains the data both for the Great Acceleration and the Great Moderation. The implication is...

The discussion of monetary policy in France, which is intended for a chapter in a general handbook on monetary policy that will cover a number of other countries as well, begins with the early postwar period and carries the story up to the present. A separate section analyses the new framework...