[...]Like the other countries examined, the United Kingdomadopted inflation targets after a successful disinflation.Unlike these countries, however, the UnitedKingdom took this step in the aftermath of a foreignexchange rate crisis in order to restore a nominalanchor and to lock in past...

Central banks, which used to be so secretive, are communicating more and more these days about their monetary policy. This development has proceeded hand in glove with a burgeoning new scholarly literature on the subject. The empirical evidence, reviewed selectively here, suggests that...

Over the past 15 years there has been remarkable progress in the specification and estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. Central banks in developed and emerging market economies have become increasingly interested in their usefulness for policy analysis and...

The remarkable stability of low domestic inflation in many countries requires explanation. In this paper, a number of competing hypotheses are evaluated on a stand-alone basis, and all are found to be inadequate. This includes the view that this outcome has been solely the result of more...

Recent theoretical work shows that changes in the volatility of inflation and/or unem-ployment affect equilibrium in°ation outcomes when the central banker's loss functionis asymmetric. We show that previous evidence offered in support of the propositionthat the volatility of unemployment helps...

Central banks typically find it difficult to turn off the "political pressure valve". This has important consequences for the types of monetary policies they implement. This paper presents an analysis of how political factors may come into play in the equilibrium determination of inflation. We...

There is a broad consensus that a central bank has to be independent of politics and that its primaryobjective is to ensure price stability. Financial crises, however, refuel the debate about the roles ofmonetary policy. This is because financial bubbles can also develop in a low-inflation...

The global financial crisis that began in mid-2007 has renewedconcerns about financial instability and focused attention onthe fundamental role of central banks in preventing andmanaging systemic crises. In response to the turmoil, centralbanks have made extensive use of both new and existing...

In this paper, we assess the effects of changes to the primarycredit facility since August 2007 by performing out-of-samplesimulations based on a model developed by Artuç andDemiralp (2008). Our results are highly consistent with thepredictions of our 2008 study—that is, the revised...