This paper examines whether the BCEAO has made use of the various policy instruments at its disposal for steering credit in the individual CFA zone member countries to complement interest rate policy at the zone level. We estimate whether private sector credit has responded systematically to...

We develop a two-sector, heterogeneous-agent model with incomplete financial markets to study the distributional effects and aggregate welfare implications of alternative monetary policy rules in emerging market economies. Relative to inflation targeting, exchange rate management benefits...

This paper compares the properties of interest rate rules such as simple Taylor rules and rules that respond to price-level fluctuations — called Wicksellian rules — in a basic forward-looking model. By introducing appropriate history dependence in policy, Wicksellian rules perform better...

This paper compares the properties of interest rate rules such as simple Taylor rules and rules that respond to price-level fluctuations - called Wicksellian rules - in a basic forward-looking model. By introducing appropriate history dependence in policy, Wicksellian rules perform better than...

This paper uses the IMF`s macroeconomic model MULTIMOD to examine the implications of the zero-interest-rate floor (ZIF) for the design of monetary policy in Japan. Similar to findings in other studies, targeting rates of inflation lower than 2.0 percent significantly increases the likelihood of...

Many explanations for the decline in real interest rates over the last 30 years point to the role that population aging or rising income inequality plays in increasing the long-run aggregate demand for assets. Notwithstanding the importance of such factors, the starting point of this paper is to...

Purpose - A major lesson of the EMU crisis is that serious disequilibria in a monetary union result from arrangements not designed to be robust to a variety of shocks. With the specter of this crisis looming substantially and scarring existing monetary zones, the present study has complemented...

In this paper we study the role of the exchange rate in conducting monetary policy in an economy with near-zero nominal interest rates as experienced in Japan since the mid-1990s. Our analysis is based on an estimated model of Japan, the United States and the euro area with rational expectations...

I give necessary and sufficient conditions under which interest-rate feedback rules eliminate aggregate instability by inducing a globally unique optimal equilibrium in a canonical New Keynesian economy with a binding zero lower bound. I consider a central bank that initially keeps interest...