Makoto Nakajima is a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve conducts monetary policy in order to achieve maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates. Monetary policy currently implemented by the Federal Reserve and other major central bank...

When he wrote this article, Ted Crone was a vice president and economist in the research Department of the Philadelphia Fed and head of the regional and microeconomics section. he has since retired. this article is available free of charge at www.philadelphiafed.org/econ/br/index. lthough there is only one national monetary policy, that does not mean that monetary policy does not affect some re...

Since 2007, many monetary authorities have drastically changed its monetary policy. They began an aggressive struggle with the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Despite the substantial decline in Central banks interest rates in US and EMU and despite the sharp easining of monetary policy in many other countries, the cost of credit to both households and businesses has generall...

The EMU accession countries are obliged to fulfill the Maastricht convergence criteria prior to entering the EMU. What should be the optimal monetary policy satisfying these criteria? To answer this question, the paper proposes a DSGE model of a two-sector small open economy. First, I derive the micro founded loss function that represents the objective function of the optimal monetary policy no...

ISSATISFACTION with persistent and volatile inflation since the mid-1960s has led to numem’ous calls for a different approach to monetary policy. In some cases, people have suggested that monetary policy decisions be made more explicitly political, for example, subject to greater control by Congress via congressionally mandated monetary growth targets. In the same vein, Milton Friedman has prop...

Motivated by the difficulties of successfully operating a discretionary monetary policy, researchers and policymakers have become increasingly interested in the stabilization properties of a credible precommitment or rule on monetary policy. The theoretical and empirical effects of various monetary rules on real sector variables, such as employment and GNP, have been extensively studied [e.g., ...

This paper argues that the primary objective of monetary policy should be long run price stability or at least a low average rate of in°ation. But there is also a welfare improving role for monetary policy in helping the economy adjust to nonpolicy shocks. This gives rise to a fundamental tension in the conduct of monetary policy. Understanding this tension is central to interpreting the qualit...

The European Union (EU) countries have started the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) on January 1, 1999. With the EMU, the EU countries replaced their national currencies and national monetary policy autonomy by a common currency, the Euro, and a common monetary policy that is designed and implemented by the European Central Bank (ECB). A common currency was considered to form the completion of...