Uruguay has experienced a remarkable recovery since the 2002 crisis, supported by sound policies and favorable external conditions. With the framework put in place in 2002, Uruguay abandoned an exchange rate peg in favor of a free float, adoped a monetary regime initially based on money targets,...

This paper develops a theory of international currency portfolios that holds in general equilibrium, and that is therefore not subject to the criticisms directed at the portfolio balance literature of the 1980s. It shows that, under plausible assumptions about fiscal policy, the relationship...

This paper analyzes the scope for systematic rules-based fiscal activism in open economies. Relative to a balanced budget rule, automatic stabilizers significantly improve welfare. But they minimize fiscal instrument volatility rather than business cycle volatility. A more aggressively...

We study the welfare properties of an economy where both monetary and fiscal policy follow simple rules, and where a subset of agents is borrowing constrained. The optimized fiscal rule is far more aggressive than automatic stabilizers, and stabilizes the income of borrowingconstrained agents,...

Several emerging economies have, until recently, experienced large government surpluses and accelerating foreign exchange reserve accumulation. This has been accompanied by economic booms, exchange rate appreciations and in some cases increases in domestic inflation. We show that one way to...

This paper uses the IMF's Global Integrated Monetary and Fiscal Model to compute shortrun multipliers of fiscal stimulus measures and long-run crowding-out effects of higher debt. Multipliers of two-year stimulus range from 0.2 to 2.2 depending on the fiscal instrument, the extent of monetary...

This paper provides a monetary model with nominal rigidities that differs from the conventional New Keynesian model with firms setting pricing policies instead of price levels. In response to permanent or highly persistent monetary policy shocks this model generates the empirically observed slow...

This study examines the macroeconomic determinants of survey inflation expectations in Brazil since the adoption of inflation targeting in 1999. The results suggest that the inflation targeting framework has helped anchor expectations, with the dispersion of inflation expectations declining...

Is backward-looking behavior in pricing or imperfect credibility of stabilization efforts responsible for the failure of inflation rates to decline to targeted levels during many disinflation programs? This paper assesses the relative importance of these two factors during a number of...