Empirical research on the degree and stability of inflation persistence in the US has produced mixed results: some suggest high and unchanged persistence during the last few decades, while others argue in favor of a decline in persistence since the early 1980s. We show that post-WWII US...

In this paper we examine the effect of having an inflation targeting framework on the dispersion of inflation forecasts from professional forecasters. We use a panel data set of 26 countries -including 14 inflation targeters- with monthly information from the last 16 years. We find that the...

This paper reviews the role of monetary policy in the disinflation process that has taken place in the Mexican economy in recent years. The purpose is to show that, once an economy establishes a sustainable fiscal position, an inflation targeting framework can be seen as an efficient mechanism...

How do the liquidity functions of banks affect investment and growth at different stages of economic development? How do financial fragility and the costs of banking crises evolve with the level of wealth of countries? We analyze these issues using an overlapping generations growth model where...

Emerging economies usually experience procyclical public expenditures, tax rates and private consumption, countercyclical default risk, interest rate spreads and current account and higher volatility in consumption than in output. In this article we develop a dynamic stochastic equilibrium model...

This paper assesses the performance of Mexican pension funds (AFORES) by using an asset pricing model that includes macroeconomic factors and benchmark portfolios to explain returns. We apply a bootstrap statistical technique to obtain the cross-sectional distribution of performance measures...

Most New Keynesian models are derived under the assumption that inflation is equal to zero in the steady-state and yet most central banks around the world have inflation targets that are greater than such a number. In this paper we consider the open economy (welfare) implications of non-zero...

We study global properties of the equilibrium set of economies with a continuous consumption space. This framework is important in intertemporal allocation problems (continuous or infinite time), financial markets with uncertainty (continuous states of nature) and commodity differentiation. We...

To advance our understanding of the mechanisms through which monetary policy affect the economy, in this note we analyze the volatilities of the Mexican short-term interest rate and of the peso-Dollar exchange rate under two monetary policy instruments: a non-borrowed reserves requirement target...

In this paper, we contribute to the discussion of what determines country risk by arguing that an important explanatory factor is the impact that commodities have on the capacity to pay. We use a newly created data base with state-level fiscal and risk premium data for Brazil states between 1891...