Policy Preferences for Output Stability before and after Inflation Targeting

É proibida a reprodução parcial ou integral do conteúdo deste documento por qualquer meio de distribuição, digital ou im-presso, sem a expressa autorização do Insper ou de seu autor. A reprodução para fins didáticos é permitida observando-sea citação completa do documento Abstract This paper examines a set of inflation-targeting countries and presents evidence on the attitude of policymakers to positive and negative output gaps. In fact, central banks may dislike deviations from potential output of one sign more than deviations of the opposite sign. Instead of the usual quadratic specification, an asymmetric loss function describes these policy preferences. In this paper, we test for asymmetries concerning the output gap. Since the degree of symmetry may change with policy regimes, we consider, for each country, two sample periods: before and after the adoption of inflation targeting. Empirical results support a quadratic loss function for the majority of monetary policymakers, irrespective of the monetary policy regime.