Based on theory and on evidence from the Southern Cone the following paper concludes for emerging market economies (1) that fiscal reform is of utmost importance for macroeconomic reforms, (2) that credibility cannot be imported via a fixed exchange rate but has to be established by internal...

The thesis analyzes monetary and labor policies under different market frictions. In the first part several versions of a microfounded dynamic general equilibrium model with monopolistic competitors in the product and/or labor market are derived and simulated. First of all, the monetary...

How can we explain the observed behavior of aggregate inflation in response to e.g. monetary policy changes? Mankiw and Reis (2002) have proposed sticky information as an alternative to Calvo sticky prices in order to model the conventional view that i) inflation reacts with delay and gradually...

Most recent discussions of deflation seem to overlook the main dangers posed by a deflationary economy and appear to offer superficial solutions. In this brief, the authors argue that, barring drastic changes in asset and output prices, deflation itself is not the main problem, but rather the...

The paper reviews the recent conduct of monetary policy and the central bank’s rule-based behavior in Russia. Using different policy rules, we test whether the central bank in Russia reacts to changes in inflation, output gap and the exchange rate in a consistent and predictable manner. Our...

The perceptions of a central bank’s inflation aversion may reflect institutional structure or, more dynamically, the history of its policy decisions. In this paper, we present a novel empirical framework that uses high-frequency data to test for persistent variation in market perceptions of...

Over the last twenty years the level and volatility of inflation decreased across industrial countries. The inflation behaviour can be explained by a shift in monetary policy or by a lucky period of low volatility in business cycle shocks. To test theluck hypothesis we examine the inflation...

The real effects of an imperfectly credible disinflation depend critically on the extent of price rigidity. In this paper, we examine how credibility affects the outcome of a disinflation in a model with endogenous time-dependent pricing rules. Both the endogenous initial degree of price...