Realignment expectations which measure exchange rate credibility are analyzed for European exchange rates, using daily financial data since the inception of the EMS. It is difficult to find economically meaningful relationships between realignment expectations and macroeconomic variables,...

An empirical model of time-varying realignment risk in an exchange rate target zone is developed. Expected rates of devaluation are estimated as the difference between interest race differentials and estimated expected rates of depreciation within the exchange rate band, using French...

We outline a method to provide advice on optimal monetary policy while taking policymakers' judgment into account. The method constructs optimal policy projections (OPPs) by extracting the judgment terms that allow a model, such as the Federal Reserve Board staff economic model, FRB/US, to...

We show how to construct optimal policy projections in Ramses, the Riksbank's open-economy medium-sized DSGE model for forecasting and policy analysis. Bayesian estimation of the parameters of the model indicates that they are relatively invariant to alternative policy assumptions and supports...

We define and study transparency, credibility, and reputation in a model where the central bank's characteristics are unobservable to the private sector and are inferred from the policy outcome. A low-credibility bank optimally conducts a more inflationary policy than a high-credibility bank, in...

We examine a central bank's endogenous choice of degree of control and degree of transparency, under both commitment and discretion. Under commitment, we find that the deliberate choice of sloppy control is far less likely under a standard central-bank loss function than reported for a...

We use a panel of annual data for over one hundred developing countries from 1971 through 1992 to characterize currency crashes. We define a currency crash as a large change of the nominal exchange rate that is also a substantial increase in the rate of change of the nominal depreciation. We...

"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...

McCallum and Nelson's (2004) criticism of targeting rules for the analysis of monetary policy is rebutted. First, McCallum and Nelson's preference to study the robustness of simple monetary-policy rules is no reason at all to limit attention to simple instrument rules; simple targeting rules may...

The optimal policy response to a low-probability extreme event is examined. A simple policy problem is solved for a sequence of different loss functions: quadratic, combined quadratic/absolute-deviation, absolute-deviation, combined quadratic/constant, and perfectionist. The paper shows that,...