Communication with the public is an ever-growing practice among central banks and complements their decisions of interest rate setting. In this paper we examine one feature of the communicational practice of the Central Bank of Chile (CBC) which summarizes the assessment of the Board about the...

The events surrounding the financial crisis and recession of 2008-2009 required significant policy responses by central banks. For formal inflation targeters (IT) a natural question arises about whether IT frameworks were flexible enough to address this unprecedented policy environment. In this...

This paper presents several methodologies for understanding the Chilean growth process. By using univariate time series representations, we find that the Chilean data is more consistent with exogenous than with endogenous growth models. Growth accounting exercises show that the mild growth rates...

This paper explores whether monetary policy and the denomination of its operative instrument affects banks’ intermediation spread in the Chilean economy. After dividing the sample into pre- and post nominalization periods, the evidence shows a positive correlation between the monetary policy...

This paper review different issues presented in the VI Annual Conference of the Central bank of Chile concerning the relationship between banking market structure, regulation and monetary policy. Topics like the transmission of the monetary policy, financial taxation, the role of foreign bank...

The traditional tests of convergence implicitly test the unit root hypothesis for per capita income series. Despite that under the null the statistics do not have standard asymptotic distributions, most papers on this topic use standard distributions to evaluate this hypothesis, with the...

Inflation targeters (ITers) have been very successful in meeting their inflation targets (ITs). Industrial output sacrifice during inflation stabilization and industrial output volatility has frequently been lowered after IT adoption. ITers have consistently reduced inflation forecast errors...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on macroeconomic policies and results in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), based on recent data for the region and the world at large. Our results show that: (i) both monetary and fiscal policies are counter- (pro-) cyclical when credibility is...

The choice between maintaining or giving up the national currency is determined by putting on balance the benefits of macroeconomic flexibility derived from a floating exchange rate and an independent monetary policy, and the microeconomic benefits derived from joining a currency union or...

It is well known that a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension system lowers saving, income, and welfare of future cohorts in a one-sector economy because it entails a transfer to the first cohorts of PAYG pensioners. Is the opposite result possible in a two-sector (formal-informal production) economy?...