We present an incomplete markets model to understand the costs and benefits of increasing government debt in a low interest rate environment. Higher risk increases the demand for safe assets, lowering the natural rate of interest below zero, constraining monetary policy at the zero lower bound,...

This paper identifies shocks to the Federal Reserve's inflation target as VAR innovations that make the largest contribution to future movements in long-horizon inflation expectations. The effectiveness of this scheme is documented via Monte-Carlo experiments. The estimated impulse responses...

On 11-12 May 2011, SUERF and the Belgian Financial Forum, in association with the Brussels Finance Institute and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) organized the 29th SUERF Colloquium "New Paradigms in Money and Finance?". All the papers in the present SUERF Study are based on...

The current monetary policy framework of the Fed intends to be more 'inclusive' by running the economy hot for longer during expansions. The logic of this strategy rests on Okun's (1973) hypothesis that sustaining a 'high-pressure economy' persistently improves labor market outcomes of low-wage...

This paper studies the effect on monetary policy of a non-homogeneous degree of competition across the (two) members of a monetary union. In particular, we assess the welfare loss brought about by the use of a simple interest rate rule that does not take into account such structural differences....

We evaluate the treatment effect of inflation targeting in seven industrial countries that adopted this policy in the 1990s. To address the self-selection problem of policy adoption, we make use of a variety of propensity score matching methods recently developed in the treatment effect...

This paper studies the impact of inflation targeting on the evolution of inflation persistence and the effects of aggregation across expenditure categories. For this purpose we use disaggregate quarterly data on 12 major subcategories of the Korean CPI. We compare persistence in a sample...

The past two decades have witnessed a worldwide move by emerging markets to adopt explicit or implicit inflation targeting regimes. A notable and often discussed exception to this trend, of course, is China which follows pegged exchange rate regime supported by capital controls. Another major...

This paper uses real-time briefing forecasts prepared for the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to provide estimates of historical changes in the design of US monetary policy and in the implied central bank target for inflation. Empirical results and FOMC transcripts support a neglected...

This paper studies monetary and fiscal policy rules, and investigates the characteristics of optimal policies. The central focus of the paper is on the comparison of two types of fiscal rules: a balanced budget and a target for the primary surplus. Balanced budget rules (or, more generally,...