Inflation targets were introduced well ahead of the development of the theory of inflation targeting. The practice was successful because it comprised a new set of procedures and institutions for setting monetary policy in a transparent and accountable fashion - "constrained discretion"; the...

The volatility of inflation and output has fallen in most advanced economies in the 1990s and 2000s. We use a monetary overlapping generations model to discuss the cause and durability of this macroeconomic change. In that model, agents' decision rules require them to make forecasts of future...

In this lecture to the London School of Economics, Mervyn King, Deputy Governor, re-examines the case for price stability ten years after Robin Leigh Pemberton asked the same question in the first LSE-Bank of England lecture. Mervyn King asks three questions. Did the benefits of low inflation...