When the nominal interest rate reaches its zero lower bound, credibility is crucial for conducting forward guidance. We determine optimal policy in a New Keynesian model when the central bank has imperfect credibility and cannot set the nominal interest rate below zero. In our model, an...

The empirical literature provides a wide range of estimates for trade elasticities at the aggregate level. Furthermore, recent contributions in international macroeconomics suggest that low (implied) values of the trade elasticity of substitution may play an important role in understanding the...

We argue that there are conditions such that any inflation targeting regime is preferable to full policy discretion, even if long-run inflation rates are identical across regimes. The key observation is that strict inflation targeting outperforms the discretionary policy response to sufficiently...

The real exchange rate is very volatile relative to major macroeconomic aggregates and its correlation with the ratio of domestic over foreign consumption is negative (Backus-Smith puzzle). These two observations constitute a puzzle to standard international macroeconomic theory. This paper...

Lack of commitment in monetary policy leads to the well known Barro-Gordon inflation bias. In this paper, we argue that two phenomena associated with the time inconsistency problem have been overlooked in the exchange rate debate. We show that, absent commitment, independent monetary policy can...

We investigate the connection between commodity price shocks and unemployment in advanced resource-rich small open economies from an empirical and theoretical perspective. Shocks to commodity prices are shown to influence labour market conditions primarily through the real exchange rate...

The global collapse in economic activity triggered by individual and policy-mandated responses to the spread of COVID-19 is unprecedented both in scale and origin. At the time of writing, U.S. GDP is expected by professional forecasters to contract a staggering 6 percent over the course of 2020...

The global collapse in economic activity triggered by individual and policy-mandated responses to the spread of COVID-19 is unprecedented both in scale and origin. At the time of writing, U.S. GDP is expected by professional forecasters to contract a staggering 6 percent over the course of 2020...