Search results for ""author michael woodford""

With the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, any pretense of a connection of the world's currencies to any real commodity has been abandoned. Yet since the 1980s, most central banks have abandoned money-growth targets as practical guidelines for monetary policy as well. How then can pure "fiat" currencies be managed so as to create confidence in the stability of national units of account? Interest and Prices seeks to provide theoretical foundations for a rule-based approach to monetary policy suitable for a world of instant communications and ever more efficient financial markets. In such a world, effective monetary policy requires that central banks construct a conscious and articulate account of what they are doing. Michael Woodford reexamines the foundations of monetary economics, and shows how interest-rate policy can be used to achieve an inflation target in the absence of either commodity backing or control of a monetary aggregate. The book further shows how the tools of modern macroeconomic theory can be used to design an optimal inflation-targeting regime--one that balances stabilization goals with the pursuit of price stability in a way that is grounded in an explicit welfare analysis, and that takes account of the "New Classical" critique of traditional policy evaluation exercises. It thus argues that rule-based policymaking need not mean adherence to a rigid framework unrelated to stabilization objectives for the sake of credibility, while at the same time showing the advantages of rule-based over purely discretionary policymaking.

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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.

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An essential introduction to one of the most timely and important subjects in economicsInternational Macroeconomics presents a rigorous and theoretically elegant treatment of real-world international macroeconomic problems, incorporating the latest economic research while maintaining a microfounded, optimizing, and dynamic general equilibrium approach. This one-of-a-kind textbook introduces a basic model and applies it to fundamental questions in international economics, including the determinants of the current account in small and large economies, processes of adjustment to shocks, the determinants of the real exchange rate, the role of fixed and flexible exchange rates in models with nominal rigidities, and interactions between monetary and fiscal policy. The book confronts theoretical predictions using actual data, highlighting both the power and limits of given theories and encouraging critical thinking. Provides a rigorous and elegant treatment of fundamental questions in international macroeconomics Brings undergraduate and master’s instruction in line with modern economic research Follows a microfounded, optimizing, and dynamic general equilibrium approach Addresses fundamental questions in international economics, such as the role of capital controls in the presence of financial frictions and balance-of-payments crises Uses real-world data to test the predictions of theoretical models Features a wealth of exercises at the end of each chapter that challenge students to hone their theoretical skills and scrutinize the empirical relevance of models Accompanied by a website with lecture slides for every chapter

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