The purpose of this report is to derive lessons from inflation targeting in Sweden for the choice of the future monetary policy regime of Iceland. Swedish inflation targeting has been a success in terms of reducing inflation and inflation volatility, but real economic volatility is not lower...

A revision of the European Central Bank's (ECB) strategy is urgently needed. For the new strategy, it is important to define the inflation target explicitly in symmetrical terms. Environmental policy objectives can in principle be reconciled with the ECB's mandate as long as they do not conflict...

This short paper use the perspective of the assignment problem to examine the evolution of the workings of monetary policy and the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Bank of England over its first 25 years. It outlines how the Bank, and the MPC, came across additional possible objectives and...

An increasing number of countries have adopted inflation targeting since New Zealand first adopted this framework in early 1990. Currently there are 21 countries using inflation targeting in every continent of the world. This paper discusses the characteristics of these countries and how the...

We develop simple diagrams that can be used by undergraduates to understand interest rate setting by policy-makers. We combine an inflation target, Fisher equation, policy reaction function and short and long run aggregate supply analysis to give a depiction of the policy problem. We illustrate...

After decades using monetary aggregates as the main instrument of monetary policy and having different varieties of crawling peg exchange rate regimes, Colombia adopted a full-fledged inflation-targeting (IT) regime in 1999, with inflation as the nominal anchor, a floating exchange rate, and the...

Recently, Svensson (1997) has shown that a combination of state-contingent inflation targeting and central banker conservatism produces optimal monetary policy if employment is persistent. We argue that the state-contingent nature of the scheme may undermine its credibility. We then show that...

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...

There seems to be no consensus in the literature with respect to monetary policy strategies in combination with flexible exchange rate regimes. Therefore, this paper determines what the alternative strategies inflation targeting, Taylor rule, monetary conditions index, and managed floating have...

We study the characteristics of inflation targeting as a shock absorber, using quarterly data for a large panel of countries. To overcome an endogeneity problem between monetary regimes and the likelihood of crises, we propose to study large natural disasters. We find that inflation targeting...