We use daily data on bank reserves and overnight interest rates to document a striking pattern in the high-frequency behavior of the U.S. market for federal funds: depository institutions tend to hold more reserves during the last few days of each “reserve maintenance period,” when the...

The author discusses "inflation targeting in an open economy and, in particular, about the choice between "strict" and "flexible" inflation targeting."

The paper discusses the implementation of inflation-targeting across countries. It argues that the intermediate variable under an inflation target is, in effect, the inflation forecast. Such a regime is shown to confer benefits over other regimes, such as money and exchange rate targeting: in...

"Forecast targeting", forward-looking monetary policy that uses central-bank judgment to construct optimal policy projections of the target variables and the instrument rate, may perform substantially better than monetary policy that disregards judgment and follows a given instrument rule. This...

Markets can deliver growth but need help from government provision of infrastructure, regulation, stabilization, and redistribution. In the 20 years since the 10th anniversary of the Single Market, growth in Europe has remained rela-tively slow. Two deep crises revealed underlying problems and...

This paper studies theoretically and empirically why and how labor policies may reduce productivity and employment in order to stabilize labor incomes and redistribute resources. It proposes a specific stylized model where the tradeoffs facing labor policies are influenced by structural factors,...

This paper studies theoretically and empirically why and how labor policies may reduce productivity and employment in order to stabilize labor incomes and redistribute resources. It proposes a specific stylized model where the tradeoffs facing labor policies are influenced by structural factors,...

"Race-to-the-bottom" deregulation is to be expected when markets operate across the borders of countries that independently choose and enforce labor policies. Less obviously, in pre-crisis EMU reforms of labor market policies were uneven and related to international imbalances. That pattern is...