This paper assesses the prospects for the new Polish monetary policy strategy of inflation targeting. Regarding the general requirements for implementing an inflation targeting strategy it appears that Poland has made sufficient progress in reducing fiscal dominance and hardening budget constraints. The paper also finds that the exchange rate has played a dominant role as a policy instrument, w...

This paper argues that non-colluding price setting firms in an uncertain economic environment will set a ‘low’ markup relative to the profit maximising markup if; (a) they are uncertain of the profit maximising markup; and (b) the cost to firms of mistakenly setting a ‘high’ markup is greater than if they mistakenly set a ‘low’ markup. Furthermore, firms will set a lower markup the higher is th...

This study attempts to estimate the rate of inflation in Pakistan by the stochastic approach to index numbers by allowing systematic changes in relative prices. This approach provides not only point estimate but also confidence interval for the rate of inflation. There are two types of approaches to index number theory namely: the functional economic approaches and the stochastic approach. The ...

The dominance of English common-law countries in prospects for financial development in the legal-origins debate has been debunked by recent findings. Using exchange rate regimes and economic/monetary integration oriented hypotheses, this paper proposes an “inflation uncertainty theory” in providing theoretical justification and empirical validity as to why French civil-law countries have highe...

We use matched point and density forecasts of output growth and inflation from the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters to derive measures of forecast uncertainty, forecast dispersion and forecast accuracy. We construct uncertainty measures from aggregate density functions as well as from individual histograms. The uncertainty measures display countercyclical behavior, and there is evidence o...

Abstract This paper revisits real-time forecasting of U.S. inflation based on Phillips curve-inspired linear regression models. Our innovation is to allow for both structural breaks in the regression parameters and the variance as well as uncertainty regarding which set of predictor variables one can include in these regressions (‘model uncertainty’). Structural breaks are described by occasion...

This paper analyzes optimal wage contracting assuming agents are not subjective expected utility maximizers but are, instead, ambiguity (or uncertainty) averse decision makers who maximize Choquet expected utility. We show that such agents will choose not to include any indexation coverage in their wage contracts even when inflation is uncertain, unless the perceived inflation uncertainty is hi...

We prove the existence of stationary monetary equilibrium with inflation in a ‘‘Bewley’’ model with constant aggregate real variables but with idiosyncratic shocks to the endowments of a continuum of individual agents, when a central bank stands ready to borrow or lend fiat money at a fixed nominal rate of interest and the agents face borrowing constraints. We also find that, in the presence of...

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