A Tale of Two Regimes: Classifying and Revisiting the Monetary Policy Regimes

The existing literature on the performance of monetary policy regimes is separate and isolated, with unidentified monetary policy framework for floating rate regime in the exchange rate regime literature and non-inflation targeting regime in the inflation targeting literature. This paper proposes a comprehensive de facto classification of monetary policy regimes based on the behavior of economic variables. The result reveals a non-negligible number of “hidden inflation targeters”, which use inflation targeting monetary policy in the absence of formally announced inflation targets. Based on the classification result, we also document monetary history and stylized facts that are highly consistent to our conventional understandings.