Inflation targeting and optimal monetary policy
By Michael Woodford. 2004
116 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Since the early 1990s, an increasing number of countries have adopted explicit inflation targets as the defining principle that should guide the conduct of monetary policy. This development is often credited with having brought about substantial reductions in both the level and variability of inflation in the inflation-targeting countries, and is sometimes argued to have improved the stability of the real economy as well. 1 Inflation-forecast targeting, as a systematic decision procedure for the conduct of monetary policy, was developed at central banks like the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, and the Bank of Sweden on a trial-and-error basis, with little guidance from the academic literature on monetary policy rules. But the growing popularity of inflation targeting has more recently led to an active literature that seeks to assess the desirability of such an approach from the standpoint of theoretical monetary economics. This literature finds that an optimal policy regime—one that could have been designed on a priori grounds to achieve the highest possible degree of social welfare—might well be implemented through procedures that share important features of the inflation-forecast targeting that is currently practiced at central banks like those just mentioned. At the same time, the normative literature finds that one ought, in principle, to be able to do better through appropriate refinement of the practices developed at these banks. Here I survey some of the most important conclusions of this literature. I shall begin by reviewing some of the respects in which inflation targeting as
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/027839264a7bdf66e8e2583fd1f5a1f43d138771
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Citations in the corpus
- Monetary policy in the UK (2007, methodology): “An inflation-targeting framework would employ a loss function of the general form (see, for example Svensson, 1999; Walsh, 2002; Woodford, 2004 ):”
- An Overview of the Survey of Consumer Expectations (2016, background): “Given the role of households in aggregate as an important driver of economic activity, monitoring and managing consumers' expectations have become primary goals of policy makers, and are central components of modern monetary policy (Woodford, 2004; Bernanke, 2007; Gali, 2008; Sims, 2009).”
- Optimal Operational Monetary Policy in the Christiano-Eichenbaum-Evans Model of the U.S. Business Cycle (2004, background): “…nominal interest rates, money growth, output, investment, 1Examples of this line of research include Ireland (1997), Rotemberg and Woodford (1997), Woodford (2003), and Clarida, Gaĺı, and Gertler (2000), among many others. consumption, labor productivity, and real profits to productivity and…”
- Understanding the Greenspan Standard (2005, background): “For more recent discussions, see Svensson (1997) or Woodford (2004). suggests was typical,75 and if there are meaningful adjustment costs associated with cyclical fluctuations, then using monetary easing to mitigate the temporary decline in output makes more sense, even though inflation will be…”
- Central Bank Communication and Policy Effectiveness (2005, unknown): “This would be desirable on other grounds as well, as discussed in Woodford (2004). of the current repo rate, as a change in the repo rate for only one month would have to change the path of inflation over the following two years by enough to get the projected inflation rate two years in the future…”
- The New Keynesian Phillips Curve: From Sticky Inflation to Sticky Prices (2008, background): “On the other hand, Jensen (2002), Rudebusch (2002), Walsh (2003b), Svensson and Woodford (2003; 2004), McCallum and Nelson (2004; 2005), and Svensson (2005) all suggest that a good monetary policy targeting rule under one set of parameter values can be a dismal one under alternative values of the…”