The main objective of monetary policy1 is to protect the value of the currency. This task is complicated by the long and variable lags between changes in the monetary policy stance and its ultimate effect on inflation. The delay between changes in monetary policy and their full effect on inflation could be as long as two and a half years. This means that monetary policy decisions have to be for...

Structural VAR models have been widely used to model monetary policy dynamics. Typically, a choice is made between regime-switching models and time-varying parameter models. In this paper we use a canonical model of monetary policy and estimate both types of time variation in monetary policy while also allowing for changing variances. The models are compared using marginal likelihood and foreca...

Recent research in monetary economics has followed the advice of McCallum (1988) and investigated the robustness properties of monetary policy rules by evaluating them in a variety of models. Evaluation across models is typically based on an exogenously specified loss function. However, the theory on which many recent monetary policy models are based implies that changes in the structure of the...

At the end of 1999, the Swiss National Bank modified its monetary policy concept and abandoned monetary targeting in favor of an approach based on an inflation forecast. Although central bank money or the monetary base, the SNB's intermediate target variable, was plagued by instabilities, the switch to a new policy framework was motivated by more fundamental problems arising from monetary targe...

A resurgence of interest in the role of banks in the transmission of monetary policy has resulted in a spate of theoretical and empirical studies. These studies have established that, under certain conditions, the traditional transmission mechanism for monetary policy ("the money view") may be augmented through changes in the supply of bank loans ("the lending view"). Because both the money vie...

During the past two decades, maintenance of low inflation, “price stability,” has become the principal focus of central banks around the world. At the same time, the view has emerged that monetary policy is better suited than fiscal policy for short-run stabilization purposes. This paper examines to what extent monetary policy can be directed at both “monetary stabilization,” stabilizing inflat...

For a country that chooses not to "permanently" fix its exchange rate through a currency board, or a common currency, or some kind of dollarization, the only alternative monetary policy that can work well in the long run is one based on the trinity of (i) a flexible exchange rate, (ii) an inflation target, and (iii) a monetary policy rule.' While not often put into this threepart format, the de...

In this paper we study the monetary and fiscal policy making in a monetary union when authorities face asymmetries in the countries constructing this monetary union. We analyze this problem in an asymmetric environment using a two-country theoretical model and by introducing two alternative types of national asymmetries : asymmetric shocks and the asymmetric transmission mechanism. The central ...

A central issue of monetary policy analysis is the specification of monetary policy shocks. In a structural vector autoregressive setting there has been some controversy about which restrictions to use for identifying the shocks because standard theories do not provide enough information to fully identify monetary policy shocks. In fact, to compare different theories it would even be desirable ...

This paper builds a structural VARMA (SVARMA) model for investigating Canadian monetary policy. Despite the support for a VARMA model for monetary policy analysis, the traditional VAR and SVAR models have predominantly been used in the literature mainly due to difficulties associated with the identification and estimation of such a model. Using the scalar component model (SCM) proposed by Athan...