High public debt often produces the drama of default and restructuring. But debt is also reduced through financial repression, a tax on bondholders and savers via negative or below market real interest rates. After WWII, capital controls and regulatory restrictions created a captive audience for...

This paper evaluates on the performance of the inflation-targeting regime in three emerging East-Asian economies that have experienced changes in monetary policy regimes, from rigidities to a flexible exchange rate and inflation targeting, after the financial crisis of 1997-98. In particular,...

After the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, Austria adhered to an exchange rate policy of adjustably pegging the schilling to a basket of stable currencies. Over the years the basket changed according to the respective priorities of overall economic policy and eventually shrunk to a single...

The last decade witnessed an unprecedented economic growth in Emerging Market Economies (EMEs). EMEs have also been the main drivers of growth in the recovery following the global financial crisis. Nevertheless, EMEs continue to face a number of institutional and structural challenges that may...

This paper proposes new measures of the effectiveness of inflation targeting (IT) and evaluates its main drivers in a (large) sample of advanced economies (AEs) and emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). Using synthetic control methods, we find that IT has heterogeneous effects on...

The economic and institutional structure required to successfully adopt and implement an inflation targeting framework (ITF) is often lacking in emerging economies. This paper evaluates these structures both qualitatively and quantitatively for Pakistan’s economy.Although our comprehensive...

Should monetary policy use its short-term policy rate to stabilize the growth in household credit and housing prices with the aim of promoting financial stability? We ask this question for the case of Canada. We find that to a first approximation, the answer is no- especially when the economy is...

This paper studies the challenge that increasing the inflation target poses to equilibrium determinacy in a medium-sized New Keynesian model without indexation fitted to the Great Moderation era. For moderate targets of the inflation rate, such as 2 or 4 percent, the probability of determinacy...

Several european politicians have complained that the ECB does not pay enough attention to job creation in the euro area. In this paper, we examine the behavior of the ECB during its first ten years of existence. We review the ECB's legal mandate, and study, using both informal evidence and...