Although there is a substantial body of literature on macroeconomic policies in Latin America, the role of fiscal and monetary policies as tools to stabilize the business cycle has not received much attention. This is understandable in light of the fact that during the last thirty years, both fiscal and monetary policies were responsible, to a large degree, for the region’s history of macroecon...

Early critics of the euro’s design pointed to the disruptive potential — both political and economic — of country-specific shocks in a monetary union that is a far cry from an optimal currency area. The euro crisis has confirmed the risks associated with a ‘one-size-fits-all’ monetary policy, decentralized financial supervision, and inadequate fiscal backstops. This article examines how the act...

I formulate a search-based asset-pricing model where equity shares and fiat money can be used as means of payment. I characterize a family of optimal stochastic monetary policies. Every policy in this family implements Friedman’s prescription of zero nominal interest rates. Under an optimal policy, equity prices and returns are independent of monetary considerations. I also study a perturbation...

This paper investigates the dynamic effects of monetary and fiscal policy in a monetary union, which is characterized by asymmetric interest rate transmission. This asymmetry gives rise to intertemporal reversals in the relative effectiveness of policy on member country outputs. The direction and the number of these reversals depend on whether policies are unanticipated or anticipated. We also ...

This paper examines the implications of uncertainty about the effects of monetary policy for optimal monetary policy with an application to the current situation. Using a stylized macroeconomic model, I derive optimal policies under uncertainty for both conventional and unconventional monetary policies. According to an estimated version of this model, the U.S. economy is currently suffering fro...

Inflation targeting is gaining popularity as a framework for conducting monetary policy. At the same time many countries employ some sort of foreign exchange intervention policy assuming that these two policies can coexist. This paper attempts to show that both policies are not sustainable. Israel is a classic test case. We test our hypothesis using information from the financial markets. The r...

The idea that a common monetary policy in a monetary union imposes costs when compared with independent policies at the country level is largely widespread in the literature. This result leads directly to a greater emphasis on national Þscal policies. We show in this paper that a common monetary policy has more power to asymmetrically affect countries than is usually stated in the literature. A...

In the past decade there have been important changes in the design and conduct of monetary policy around the world. Movements in global capital during the late 1990s and the greater emphasis on price stability forced many countries to abandon fixed exchange rate regimes and to design institutions and monetary policies to achieve credibility in the goal of lowering inflation. Such recent deve lo...