In recent years, five of the main economies in Latin America - Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Colombia and Peru - have adopted Inflation Targeting regimes. In the context of these converging monetary strategies, would the IT nations in the region be better o adopting a common currency? Would they be...

The paper re-examines Sweden's price level targeting during the 1930s which is regarded as a precursor of today's inflation targeting. According to conventional wisdom the Riksbank was the first central bank to adopt price level targeting as the guideline for its activities, although in practice...

This paper examines the inflation record of 29 inflation and non inflation targeting economies. Both industrial and emerging market economies are considered. Empirical evidence is based on a comparison of actual and forecasted inflation, an econometric analysis that estimates changes in...

This paper argues that the inflation targeting regime prevailing in the United Kingdom is not the result of a change in policymaker objectives. By conducting an analysis of U.K. policymakers that parallels Romer and Romer's (2004) study of Federal Reserve Chairmen, I demonstrate that policymaker...

Transparency is a central element in most aspects of the design and operation of inflation targeting regimes. This paper focuses on three elements of inflation targeting most closely associated with transparency: (i) the institutional arrangements supporting inflation targeting' (ii) the...

This paper assesses the value of delegating price level targets to a discretionary central bank in an economy with nominal frictions in both labor and product markets. In contrast to recent studies that demonstrate the benefits of targeting the price of output, model simulations provide evidence...

Many economists, including former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, believe that the gold standard generates poor economic outcomes including output volatility, price instability, financial panics, the spread of recessions via the exchange rate, and speculation-induced collapse. These problems,...

In this paper we investigate whether the existing legislative framework provides for some of the necessary conditions to successfully implement an inflation targeting regime. We conclude that although there is place for changes to the legal framework to improve the environment for implementing...

We present a pricing kernel that summarizes well the main features of the dynamics of interest rates and risk in postwar U.S. data and use it to uncover how the pricing kernel has moved with the short rate. Our findings imply that standard monetary models miss an essential link between the...

Nominal GDP level targeting (NGDPLT) has become an increasingly popular monetary policy framework over the past decade. This rising popularity has led to increased interest in, as well as some confusion over, how this framework actually works. This paper responds to this interest by summarizing...