The impact of oil shocks is analyzed by estimating an augmented Phillips curve on a national, regional and city level in the United States. A significant pass-through to inflation (including all items) is recorded for all regions, while core inflation remains largely muted. The West region has experienced a much lower pass-through than other regions and a few reasons for this are; greater oil e...

At the end of the 80’s Central European Countries started to abandon their administratively fixed exchange rates and graudally adopted new monetary regimes with more or less emphasis on the exchange rate, inflation and growth targets. This study analyses the economic background of the choice of monetary regime in these countries and their success in curbing inflation. The main question the pape...

ARLIER in the decade, a number of industrial countries adopted a framework for carrying out monetary policy that became known as inflation targeting. They adopted this framework as a response to the difficulties they had encountered in conducting their monetary policy using an exchange rate peg or some monetary aggregate as the main intermediate target. At the same time, they saw the move as a ...

In light of the financial crisis, the practice of inflation targeting (IT) has been blamed for authorities’ failure to respond to the increase in financial systemic risk and to the development of asset bubbles. However, utilizing a rich database containing nearly 5500 commercial banks from 70 countries (among which, 22 are IT) for the period 1998–2012, this paper argues that on average, inflati...

Because inflation targeting is a relatively recent phenomena, in the past we have had insufficient data to conduct time-series econometric work to evaluate this important new monetary policy strategy. However, now that inflation targeting has been around for close to ten years, we are able to do some preliminary econometric work on this topic. This is exactly what Neumann and von Hagen do in th...

The adoption of a credible monetary policy regime such as inflation targeting is known to reduce the persistence of inflation fluctuations. This conclusion, however, is derived from aggregate inflation or sectoral inflation rates, not from regional inflation data. This paper studies the regional dimension of inflation targeting, i.e. the consequences of inflation targeting for regional inflatio...

Using an optimizing model we compare alternative monetary policy rules and exchange rate regimes for a small stochastic open economy with imperfect competition and short run price rigidity. The criteria to choose among rules and regimes are obtained using a welfare criterion derived from the utility function of the representative agent. The main findings of this paper are that, depending on wha...

This paper uses a new data set that better measures inflation uncertainty to investigate the effects of inflation and inflation uncertainty on economic growth. In the cross section of forty-four countries that the new data allows, inflation uncertainty has a significant negative impact on economic growth. Uncertainty performs better than inflation crisis as an explanatory variable of economic g...

An increasing number of emerging and developing countries have adopted or are transitioning towards full-fledged inflation targeting (FFIT) as the main monetary policy framework to anchor inflation. In this paper, we explore FFIT regime a means for Mauritius achieve stable inflation, inflationary expectations establish credibility in committing price stability its primary goal. This paper revie...

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the relation between inflation and globalization, measured in terms of trade and financial openness. Using a large crosssection of 91 countries covering the period 1985-2004, we establish two main empirical regularities. Both higher trade and financial openness i) reduce central bank’s inflation bias,yielding lower average inflation, and ii) are...