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When uncertain about inflation persistence, central banks are well-advised to adopt a robust strategy when setting interest rates. This robust approach, characterized by a "better safe than sorry" philosophy, entails incurring a modest cost to safeguard against a protracted period of deviating inflation. Applied to the post-pandemic period of exceptional uncertainty and elevated inflation, this strategy would have called for a tightening bias. Specifically, a high level of uncertainty surrounding wage, profit, and price dynamics requires a more front-loaded increase in interest rates compared to a baseline scenario which the policymaker fully understands how shocks to those variables are transmitted to inflation and output. This paper provides empirical evidence of such uncertainty and estimates a New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model for the euro area to derive a robust interest rate path for the ECB which serves to illustrate the case for insuring against inflation turning out to have greater persistence.
This FEDS Note considers the implications of uncertainty regarding the persistence of inflation for the conduct of monetary policy.
Understanding the sources of inflation persistence is crucial for monetary policy. This paper provides an empirical assessment of the influence of inflation expectations' anchoring on the persistence of inflation. We construct a novel index of inflation expectations' anchoring using survey-based inflation forecasts for 45 economies starting in 1989. We then study the response of consumer prices to terms-of-trade shocks for countries with flexible exchange rates. We find that these shocks have a significant and persistent effect on consumer price inflation when expectations are poorly anchored. By contrast, inflation reacts by less and returns quickly to its pre-shock level when expectations are strongly anchored.
Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.
We analyse the interaction between private agents? uncertainty about inflation target and the central bank's data uncertainty. In our model, private agents update their perceived inflation target and the central bank estimates unobservable economic shocks as well as the perceived inflation target. Under those two uncertainties, the learning process of both private agents and the central bank causes higher order beliefs to become relevant, and this mechanism is capable of generating high persistence and volatility of inflation even though the underlying shocks are purely transitory. We also find that the persistence and volatility become smaller as the inflation target becomes more credible, that is, the private agents' uncertainty about inflation target (and hence the bank's data uncertainty) diminishes.
Alan S. Blinder offers the dual perspective of a leading academic macroeconomist who served a stint as Vice-Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board—one who practiced what he had long preached and then returned to academia to write about it. He tells central bankers how they might better incorporate academic knowledge and thinking into the conduct of monetary policy, and he tells scholars how they might reorient their research to be more attuned to reality and thus more useful to central bankers. Based on the 1996 Lionel Robbins Lectures, this readable book deals succinctly, in a nontechnical manner, with a wide variety of issues in monetary policy. The book also includes the author's suggested solution to an age-old problem in monetary theory: what it means for monetary policy to be "neutral."
This is the second chapter of a forthcoming monograph entitled "On Implementing Full-Fledged Inflation-Targeting Regimes: Saying What You Do and Doing What You Say." We begin by discussing the costs of inflation, including their role in generating boom-bust cycles. Following a general discussion of the need for a nominal anchor, we describe a specific type of monetary anchor, the inflation-targeting regime, and its two key intellectual roots-the absence of long-run trade-offs and the time-inconsistency problem. We conclude by providing a brief introduction to the way in which inflation targeting works.
Output gap estimates are subject to a wide range of uncertainty owing to data revisions and the difficulty in distinguishing between cycle and trend in real time. This is important given the central role in monetary policy of assessments of economic activity relative to capacity. We show that country desks tend to overestimate economic slack, especially during recessions, and that uncertainty in initial output gap estimates persists several years. Only a small share of output gap revisions is predictable ex ante based on characteristics like output dynamics, data quality, and policy frameworks. We also show that for a group of Latin American inflation targeters the prescriptions from typical monetary policy rules are subject to large changes due to output gap revisions. These revisions explain a sizable proportion of the deviation of inflation from target, suggesting this information is not accounted for in real-time policy decisions.