Despite U.S. fiscal problems, the Fed appears to still retain excellent inflation credibility with financial markets… Although confidence in the Fed might explain the quiescence of inflation expectations, the structure of U.S. government debt may be more important… [I]nflating away the U.S....

Large-scale asset purchases may have limited power to raise TIPS-implied inflation expectations—something that might appeal to policymakers fighting deflation.

Common shocks, similarities in central bank reaction functions, and international trade potentially produce common components in international inflation rates. This paper characterizes such links in international inflation rates with a dynamic latent factor model that decomposes inflation for 65...

This paper examines the incidence and welfare costs of inflation in the presence of financial market frictions and home production. The results suggest that financing constraints on firms' working capital expenditures significantly increase the welfare costs relative to the standard...

Ball (1997) shows using a small closed economy model that nominal GDP targeting can lead to instability. This paper extends Ball's model to uncover the role inflation expectations play in generating this instability. By changing the process by which inflation expectations are formed in the...

Central banks pay close attention to inflation expectations. In standard models, however, inflation expectations are tied down by the assumption of rational expectations and should be of little independent interest to policy makers. In this paper, we relax the assumption of rational expectations...

This paper derives a closed-form solution for the optimal discretionary monetary policy in a small macroeconomic model that allows for varying degrees of forward-looking behavior. We show that a more forward-looking aggregate demand equation serves to attenuate the response to inflation and the...

Economic outcomes in dynamic economies with forward-looking agents depend crucially on whether or not the central bank can precommit, even in the absence of the traditional "inflation bias." This paper quantifies the welfare differential between precommitment and discretionary policy in both a...

This paper solves for optimal policy rules in a stylized small open economy model under a spectrum of targeting regimes. These policy reaction functions are presented as feedback rules highlighting the dominant state variables in each rule. Optimal simple rules - rules that exploit a reduced...