A key practical challenge for monetary policy is to gauge the extent to which the private sector perceives the central bank’s nominal anchor as transparent and credible. In light of that challenge, this commentary discusses some evidence on the evolution of longer-term inflation expectations...

The introduction of the euro was intended to integrate markets within Europe further, after the implementation of the 1992 Single Market Project. We examine the extent to which this objective has been achieved, by examining the degree of price dispersion between countries in the euro zone,...

To be useful in discussions about the rationale and effectiveness of unconventional monetary policy, models of monetary economies need to be modified. Progress on this is well under way and I review one approach here.

A two-country general equilibrium model with large wage setters is developed to investigate the welfare implications of moving from a flexible exchange rate regime to a monetary union. The paper shows that the currency regime not only affects the central bank’s incentive to improve the terms...

In this paper we adopt a Bayesian approach toward the estimation of monetary policy preference parameters in a general equilibrium framework for the euro area. We assume that monetary policy authorities optimize an intertemporal quadratic loss function under commitment and study two alternative...

"Forecast targeting", forward-looking monetary policy that uses central-bank judgment to construct optimal policy projections of the target variables and the instrument rate, may perform substantially better than monetary policy that disregards judgment and follows a given instrument rule. This...

We investigate whether the anchoring properties of longrun inflation expectations in the United States, the euro area, and the United Kingdom have changed around the economic crisis that erupted in mid-2007. We document that surveybased measures of long-run inflation expectations remained fairly...

Although central banks recently expanded their balance sheets by unconventional policy actions, little theory is available to explain how and when central banks’ balance sheets affect inflation and impose restrictions on monetary policy. A DSGE model predicts that central banks’ balance...

This paper investigates the stabilization bias that arises in a model of monetary and fiscal policy stabilization of the economy, when monetary authority puts higher weight on inflation stabilization than society. We demonstrate that inflation conservatism unambiguously leads to social welfare...

In this paper, we consider whether long-term inflation expectations have become better anchored in Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. We do so using survey-based measures as well as financial-market-based measures of long-term inflation expectations, where we construct the market-based measures from...