This paper seeks to draw lessons from the IMF’s experience in handling financial crises around the globe over the past ten years that are relevant to the challenges faced by countries in Latin America, especially in the wake of the recent crisis in Argentina. Experience suggests that...

The GCC countries maintain a policy of open capital accounts and a pegged (or nearly-pegged) exchange rate, thereby reducing their freedom to run an independent monetary policy. This paper shows, however, that the pass-through of policy rates to retail rates is on the low side, reflecting the...

Uruguay’s inflation and inflation expectations exceed the inflation target, and the gap has been widening in recent years. To help bring it to the mid-point of the target, Banco Central del Uruguay (BCU) needs to maintain a tightening bias in addition to strengthening its communication....

This Selected Issues paper discusses Romania’s modeling monetary policy. A simple Forecasting and Policy Analysis System (FPAS) for Romania has been designed to help in the preparation of the IMF staff’s forecasts and policy assessments. A major advantage of this approach is that...

This paper extends a small linear model of the Israeli economy to allow for nonlinearities in the inflation-output process that arise from convexity in the Phillips curve and endogenous monetary policy credibility. We find that the dynamic responses to shocks in the extended model more closely...

This paper argues that limited asset market participation is crucial in explaining U.S. macroeconomic performance and monetary policy before the 1980s, and their changes thereafter. We develop an otherwise standard sticky-price dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, which implies that at...

Norway adopted an inflation targeting framework in early 2001, thus concluding its gradual but consistent move toward greater exchange rate flexibility. This paper assesses the institutional and technical design of the framework, as well as its potential implications for the practical...

This paper proposes a markedly different transmission mechanism from monetary policy to the macroeconomy, focusing on how policy changes nominal inertia in the Phillips curve. Using recent theoretical developments, we examine the properties of a small, estimated U.S. monetary model...

Stochastic simulations are employed to compare performance of monetary policy rules in linear and nonlinear variants of a small macro model with NAIRU uncertainity under different assumptions about the way inflation expectations are formed. Cases in which policy credibility is ignored or treated...

This paper proposes a new method of estimating the Taylor rule with a time-varying implicit inflation target and a time-varying natural rate of interest. The inflation target and the natural rate are modeled as random walks and are estimated using maximum likelihood and the Kalman filter. I...