This paper evaluates the role of inflation-forecast heterogeneity in US monetary policy making. The deviation between private and central bank inflation forecasts is identified as a factor increasing inflation persistence and thus calling for a policy reaction. An optimal policy rule is derived...

This Selected Issues paper on the United Kingdom reviews the IMF's Global Economy Model, which incorporates energy to examine the impact of rising energy prices on the United Kingdom. The model incorporates energy as a final consumption good as well as a primary input in the production process....

This paper motivates and describes an approach to forecasting and monetary policy analysis based on the use of a simple structural macroeconomic model, along the lines of those in use in a number of central banks. It contrasts this approach with financial programming and its emphasis on monetary...

This paper presents a survey of the literature on the measurement of central bank autonomy. We distinguish inputs that constitute the building blocks in the literature, and the literature that builds on them. Issues including sensitivity analysis, robustness, and endogeneity are discussed. The...

The paper evaluates the 24-month ahead inflation forecasting performance of various indicators of underlying inflation and structural models. The inflation forecast errors resulting from model misspecification are larger than the errors resulting from forecasting of exogenous variables. Also,...

This paper provides some empirical estimates on how tightly is it feasible to control inflation in a very small open economy such as Iceland. Estimated macroeconomic models of Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States are used to derive efficient monetary policy...

How should a central bank organize itself to produce the best possible inflation forecast? This paper discusses elements for building a comprehensive platform for an inflation forecasting framework. It describes the exercise of forecasting inflation as a production process, which induces a...

We study how the inclusion of growth rates of monetary aggregates or changes in stock market indices affects the stabilization performance of optimal monetary policy rules when there is uncertainty about the structure of the economy. With a simulation model of the U.S. economy we show that the...