This timely volume presents the latest thinking on the monetary policy rules and seeks to determine just what types of rules and policy guidelines function best. A unique cooperative research effort that allowed contributors to evaluate different policy rules using their own specific approaches, this collection presents their striking findings on the potential response of interest rates to an array of variables, including alterations in the rates of inflation, unemployment, and exchange. Monetary Policy Rules illustrates that simple policy rules are more robust and more efficient than complex rules with multiple variables. A state-of-the-art appraisal of the fundamental issues facing the Federal Reserve Board and other central banks, Monetary Policy Rules is essential reading for economic analysts and policymakers alike.

Over the past fifteen years, a significant number of industrialized and middle-income countries have adopted inflation targeting as a framework for monetary policymaking. As the name suggests, in such inflation-targeting regimes, the central bank is responsible for achieving a publicly announced target for the inflation rate. While the objective of controlling inflation enjoys wide support among both academic experts and policymakers, and while the countries that have followed this model have generally experienced good macroeconomic outcomes, many important questions about inflation targeting remain. In Inflation Targeting, a distinguished group of contributors explores the many underexamined dimensions of inflation targeting—its potential, its successes, and its limitations—from both a theoretical and an empirical standpoint, and for both developed and emerging economies. The volume opens with a discussion of the optimal formulation of inflation-targeting policy and continues with a debate about the desirability of such a model for the United States. The concluding chapters discuss the special problems of inflation targeting in emerging markets, including the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary.

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.

Monetary policy faces a particularly difficult task in most economies going through structural reforms: having to stabilise fluctuations around the trend, central banks have also to deal with a trend that is itself subjected to shifts, as a result of reforms. This book proposes some perspectives on these issues, with various contributions from both practitioners and academics, emphasising how rather simple techniques can be conveniently used to solve complex problems. Several issues are hence considered, each emphasising a particular aspect of the theme proposed: (i) forecasting inflation, with the experience of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand being taken as an example, since this country went through drastic structural change, (ii) understanding underlying trends of inflation, focusing on expectations and data revision, wage-bargaining process and more generally supply effects, since structural change magnifies them, (iii) formulating policy recommendations, the example taken is the strategy towards the euro for Eastern European countries and (iv) assessing risks of sudden stops.

The form of bounded rationality characterizing the representative agent is key in the choice of the optimal monetary policy regime. While inflation targeting prevails for myopia that distorts agents' inflation expectations, price level targeting emerges as the optimal policy under myopia regarding the output gap, revenue, or interest rate. To the extent that bygones are not bygones under price level targeting, rational inflation expectations is a minimal condition for optimality in a behavioral world. Instrument rules implementation of this optimal policy is shown to be infeasible, questioning the ability of simple rules à la Taylor (1993) to assist the conduct of monetary policy. Bounded rationality is not necessarily associated with welfare losses.