This paper uncovers Taylor rules from estimated monetary policy reactions using a structural VAR on U.S. data from 1959 to 2009. These Taylor rules reveal the dynamic nature of policy responses to different structural shocks. We find that U.S. monetary policy has been far more responsive over...

This paper develops a small open economy dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with macrofinancial linkages. The model includes a financial accelerator--entrepreneurs are assumed to partially finance investment using domestic and foreign currency debt--to assess the importance of...

This paper considers optimal communication by monetary policy committees in a model of imperfect knowledge and learning. The main policy implications are that there may be costs to central bank communication if the public is perpetually learning about the committee's decision-making process and...

Is it desirable that central banks be more transparent in the communication of sensible information when agents have diverse private information? In practice, there exists some consensus about the benefits of acting in this way. However, other studies warn that increasing the precision of public...

Several emerging economies have, until recently, experienced large government surpluses and accelerating foreign exchange reserve accumulation. This has been accompanied by economic booms, exchange rate appreciations and in some cases increases in domestic inflation. We show that one way to...

This paper investigates how monetary policy can help ward off a protracted deflationary slump when policy rates are near the zero bound by studying the experience of Japan during the "Lost Decade" which followed the asset-price bubble collapse in the early 1990s. Estimation results based on a...

Official accumulation of foreign reserves may be perceived as interventions to influence the exchange rate, undermining the credibility of floating exchange rates and inflation targets. This paper develops a theoretical framework to study the interaction between reserve accumulation and monetary...

The growth literature has had problems explaining the "sub-Saharan African growth dummy" in cross-country regressions. Instead of taking the usual approach of focusing on long-run growth and assuming that sub-Saharan countries have homogenous parameters in growth regressions, we concentrate our...