This paper reviews Allan H. Meltzer’s A History of the Federal Reserve, Volume 2. This two-book volume covers Federal Reserve policies from 1951 to 1986. The book represents an enormous achievement in synthesizing a great amount of archival information into a historical account grounded on...

We estimate the path of inflation persistence in the United States over the last fifty years using an ARMA model of inflation with time-varying autoregressive parameter, motivated by the familiar New Keynesian framework. The estimated path of inflation persistence is consistent with a general...

New lessons, challenges, and debates have emerged from the subprime crisis in the United States. While the macroeconomic orientation is not new and has always been among the classic toolkits of central banks for ensuring financial stability, the current explicit articulation and specification of...

This paper measures sacrifice ratios for all countries in the world over an approximately forty year time period, in addition to exploring the determinants of worldwide sacrifice ratios. We test the most commonly-cited determinants: the speed of disinflation, openness, central bank independence,...

Although growth deceleration in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is inevitable, if the country’s new direction of financial policy (on exchange rate, capital flows, banking, capital market) can be achieved, it will be good not only for the country but also for the rest of Asia. This is...

This article analyses the effect of the asset purchase programmes implemented by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England in the wake of the global financial crisis on market- and survey-based measures of inflation expectations. The analysis suggests that central bank asset purchases did have...

Four major central banks have adopted new approaches to policy rate forward guidance with the aim of enhancing the effectiveness of monetary policy at the zero lower bound. In this special feature, we examine these approaches and assess their impact. So far, the forward guidance appears to have...

In this paper, we provide empirical evidence on the factors that motivated emerging economies to change their capital outflow controls in recent decades. Liberalization of capital outflow controls can allow emerging-market economies (EMEs) to reduce net capital inflow (NKI) pressures, but may...

The days when secrecy and opacity were the bywords of central banking are gone. The advent of inflation targeting in the early 1990s acted as the catalyst for enhanced transparency and communications in the conduct of monetary policy. In the wake of the 2007-09 global financial crisis, this...

This paper analyzes whether dynamic provisioning systems act as a dampener -as intended- or as a buffer. After briefly reviewing the literature, we explain the rationale for dynamic provisions and analyze the experience of three of the few countries that adopted them: Spain, Colombia and Peru....