Economic agents make decisions using real-time data. However, recent literature has shown that several economic activity measures go through important revisions over time, impairing the reliability of real-time data. We organize a real-time dataset for Brazil’s GDP, and assess the revisions of...

This study provides a set of tools to analyze the monetary and exchange rate policy issues in the seven countries of the Inter-American Development Bank's Caribbean region (The Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, Haiti, Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago). It then applies some of them to the...

This paper assesses inflation targeting in emerging market economies (EMEs), and develops applied prescriptions for the conduct of monetary policy and inflation-targeting design in EMEs. We verify that EMEs have faced more acute trade-offs - higher output and inflation volatility - and worse...

This paper assesses the first three years of the inflation-targeting regime in Brazil adopted in July 1999. The inflation-targeting framework has shown to be highly important for the macroeconomic stabilization. We stress three important challenges: construction of credibility, change in...

This paper investigates monetary policy and basic macroeconomic relation-ships involving output, inflation rate, interest rate, and money in Brazil. Based on a vector autoregressive (VAR) estimation, it compares three different periods: moderately increasing inflation (1975-1985), high inflation...