During the turbulent 1970s and 1980s the Bundesbank established an outstandingreputation in the world of central banking. Germany achieved a high degree of domesticstability and provided safe haven for investors in times of turmoil in the internationalfinancial system. Eventually the Bundesbank...

Faced with real and nominal shocks, what should a benevolent central bankdo, …x the money growth rate or target the inflation rate? In this paper, wemake a …rst attempt at studying the optimal choice of monetary policy in-struments in a micro-founded model of money. Speci…cally, we produce...

The tug-o-war for supremacy between inflation targeting and monetary tar-geting is a classic yet timely topic in monetary economics. In this paper, werevisit this question within the context of a pure-exchange overlapping genera-tions model of money where spatial separation and random relocation...

In this paper, we argue that the observed di¤erence in the cost of intraday and overnightliquidity is part of an optimal payments system design. In our environment, the interestcharged on overnight liquidity a¤ects output while the cost of intraday liquidity onlyaffects the distribution of...

This paper investigates the role of trade credit in the transmissionof monetary policy. Most models of the transmission mechanism allowthe firm to access only financial markets or bank lending according tosome net worth criterion. In our model we introduce trade creditas an additional source of...

[...]In my view, a goal of price stability requires thatmonetary policy be oriented beyond the horizon of itsimmediate impact on inflation and the economy. Thisimmediate horizon is on the order of two to three years.This orientation properly puts the focus of a forwardlookingpolicy on the time...

[...]The first intellectual development challenging the use ofan activist monetary policy to stimulate output and reduceunemployment is the finding, most forcefully articulatedby Milton Friedman, that the effects of monetary policyhave long and variable lags.1 The uncertainty of the timingand...

There is a broad consensus that a central bank has to be independent of politics and that its primaryobjective is to ensure price stability. Financial crises, however, refuel the debate about the roles ofmonetary policy. This is because financial bubbles can also develop in a low-inflation...

[...]In the case studies that follow, we will see that thedesign choices for an inflation-targeting regime fall intofour basic categories: definition and measurement of thetarget, transparency, flexibility, and timing.[...]

Many features of the German monetary targetingregime are also key elements of inflationtargeting in the other countries examined inthis study. Indeed, as pointed out in Bernanke and Mishkin(1997), Germany might best be thought of as a “hybrid”inflation targeter, in that it has more in common...