Most macroeconomic models for monetary policy analysis are approximated around a zeroinflation steady state, but most central banks target inflation at a rate of about 2 percent. Many economists have recently proposed even higher inflation targets to reduce the incidence of the zero lower bound...

In Japan, the inflation rate declined to near-zero, whereas the monetary policy faced a zero lower bound (ZLB) in the 1990s. We examine whether trend inflation had fallen to near-zero prior to the ZLB. To achieve this, we estimate Japanese pre-2000 trend inflation developing a Markov-switching...

The purpose of this paper is to measure inflation persistence in the following countries of Central and Southeastern Europe: Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Serbia. The study sample covers monthly data from January, 1995 to May, 2010 for Poland, Hungary and Slovakia,...

We study the properties of the optimal nominal interest rate policy under different levels of price indexation. In our model indexation regulates the sources of inflation persistence. When indexation is zero, the inflation gap is purely forward- looking and inflation persistence depends only on...

We analyze the impact of price stability-oriented monetary strategies (inflation targeting - IT - and constraining exchange rate arrangements) on inflation persistence using a time-varying coefficients framework in a panel of 68 countries (1993-2013). We show that explicit IT has a stronger...

Which level of inflation should Central Banks be targeting? The authors investigate this issue in the context of a simplified Agent Based Model of the economy. Depending on the value of the parameters that describe the micro-behaviour of agents (in particular inflation anticipations), they find...

Monetary policy is often analysed in terms of simple rules. Such rules may be useful for many purposes, even when they do not describe the actual monetary policy strategy exactly. This paper compares monetary policy in Sweden during the inflation-targeting regime 19932002 with the policies...

Which level of inflation should Central Banks be targeting? The authors investigate this issue in the context of a simplified Agent Based Model of the economy. Depending on the value of the parameters that describe the behaviour of agents (in particular inflation anticipations), they find a rich...

We measure the tone (sentiment) of the ECB's Governing Council regarding economic outlook at the time of each monetary policy meeting and use this information together with the Eurosystem/ECB staff macroeconomic projections to directly estimate the Governing Council's loss function. Our results...