Guiding and anchoring inflation expectations of the public are key tasks of modern central banks. In this paper we investigate how the European Central Bank (ECB) influences inflation expectations of professional forecasters. We argue that it is a good sign that interest rate changes as such are not significant in explaining inflation expectations: The ECB has been able to prepare professional ...

A remarkable feature of the economic performance of industrial countries in the postwar period is that there has been persistent inflation, in clear contrast to the XIX century and the period up to World-War I, which saw significant fluctuations in the general price level around a fairly stable mean. However, when one looks at inflation over the past thirty years, it is striking that, in contra...

A number of authors have developed varied indices for measuring central bank independence with the aim of determining whether there is any association between central bank independence and inflation rates. Most analyses focused on industrialized countries, although more recently the interest has shifted to the emerging and less developed countries. The general trust of the results of these stud...

Changes in nominal interest rates must be due to either movements in real interest rates, expected inflation, or the inflation risk premium. We develop a term structure model with regime switches, time-varying prices of risk, and inflation to identify these components of the nominal yield curve. We find that the unconditional real rate curve in the U.S. is fairly flat around 1.3%. In one real r...

The past three decades have seen an extraordinary transformation in the conduct of monetary policy. In the 1970s, inflation had risen to very high levels, with most countries, including the United States, experiencing inflation rates in the double digits. Today, almost all nations in the world are in a low inflation environment. Of 223 countries, 193 currently have annual inflation rates less t...

We construct a model that captures New Monetarist ideas in order to explain post-Great Recession observations on inflation, nominal interest rates, and real interest rates. When finance constraints bind, the model can deliver low real interest rates and positive rates of inflation at the zero lower bound. Optimal monetary policy in the face of a financial crisis shock implies a positive nominal...

Many countries simultaneously suffer from high rates of inflation, low growth rates of per capita income and poorly developed financial sectors. In this paper, we integrate a microfounded model of money and finance into a model of endogenous growth to examine the effects of inflation and financial development. We address two quantitative issues. One is the effects of an exogenous improvement in...

In a passive monetary and active fiscal policy regime, changes in the value of public debt generate wealth effects on households. Then, in contrast to the active monetary and passive fiscal policy regime, inflation moves oppositely from the inflation target and a stronger reaction of interest rates to inflation increases the response of inflation to shocks. Moreover, a higher level of public de...

We argue that there are conditions such that any inflation targeting regime is preferable to full policy discretion, even if long-run inflation rates are identical across regimes. The key observation is that strict inflation targeting outperforms the discretionary policy response to sufficiently persistent shocks. Under full policy discretion, inflation expectations over the medium term respond...

This paper examines the welfare implications of managing asset-price with consumer-price inflation targeting by monetary authorities who have to learn the laws of motion for both inflation rates. The central bank can reduce the volatility of consumption as well as improve welfare more effectively if it adopts state-contingent Taylor rules aimed at inflation and Qgrowth targets in this learning ...