Search Results
Speech
Bullard Discusses Monetary Policy and Inflation Outlook with Bloomberg
St. Louis Fed President James Bullard discussed the Federal Open Market Committee’s flexible average inflation targeting approach and why he thinks inflation may move higher in the near term. He spoke during an appearance on “Bloomberg Daybreak: Australia.”
Speech
Hawks, doves, bubbles, and inflation targets
April 16, 2012. "Hawks, Doves, Bubbles, and Inflation Targets" Presented at the George S. Eccles Distinguished Lecture, Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, Utah State University.
Working Paper
Average Inflation Targeting and Household Expectations
Using a daily survey of U.S. households, we study how the Federal Reserve’s announcement of its new strategy of average inflation targeting affected households’ expectations. Starting with the day of the announcement, there is a very small uptick in the minority of households reporting that they had heard news about monetary policy relative to prior to the announcement, but this effect fades within a few days. Those hearing news about the announcement do not seem to have understood the announcement: they are no more likely to correctly identify the Fed’s new strategy than others, nor ...
Working Paper
Monetary policy in a forward-looking input-output economy
This paper examines the implications for monetary policy of sticky prices in both final and intermediate goods in a New Keynesian model. Both optimal policy under commitment and discretionary policy, which is the minimization of a simple loss function, are studied. Consumer utility losses under alternative simple loss functions are compared, including their robustness to model and shock misperceptions, and parameter uncertainty. Targeting inflation in both consumer and intermediate goods performs better than targeting a single price index; price-level targeting of both consumer and ...
Briefing
Inflation targeting: central bank practice overseas
This policy brief, which is based on an internal memo, summarizes the institutional and operational features observed in the 27 countries that have gained experience with inflation targeting (IT). It finds considerable convergence in many IT practices across countries over the past 10 to 15 years but much variation in policymakers? choices concerning such key issues as how they treat the borders of the target range. On the whole, most IT banks have chosen to practice inflation targeting in a more flexible and, thus, resilient fashion than many analysts once feared?seemingly without much loss ...
Working Paper
Did the Federal Reserve Break the Phillips Curve? Theory and Evidence of Anchoring Inflation Expectations
In a macroeconomic model with drifting long-run inflation expectations, the anchoring of inflation expectations manifests in two testable predictions. First, expectations about inflation far in the future should no longer respond to news about current inflation. Second, better-anchored inflation expectations weaken the relationship between unemployment and inflation, flattening the reduced-form Phillips curve. We evaluate both predictions and find that communication of a numerical inflation objective better anchored inflation expectations in the United States but failed to anchor expectations ...
Journal Article
The financial crisis and inflation expectations
One measure of a successful monetary policy is its ability to anchor expectations about future inflation rates. Financial crises, such as that of 2008?09, can be considered natural experiments that test this anchoring. The effects of the crisis on inflation expectations were largely temporary in the United States, but longer-lasting in the United Kingdom. That is surprising because the United Kingdom had a formal inflation target during this period. Expectations may have been affected more because inflation stayed above the central bank?s target for extended periods following the crisis.
Journal Article
Inflation targeting and revisions to inflation data: a case study with PCE inflation
Central banks around the world have come to recognize the importance of maintaining low and stable inflation. One widely employed tool for helping to do so is known as inflation targeting, whereby a central bank sets a numeric goal for inflation. Once this target is publicly stated, the bank can be held accountable for its actions in regard to meeting, or not meeting, this target. Countries that have adopted such a tool have generally had a favorable experience, and there is evidence that inflation targeting is correlated with increased stability in output growth, lower inflation, and more ...
Working Paper
The term structure of inflation compensation in the nominal yield curve
We propose a DSGE model with regime switching in the central bank?s inflation target to explain inflation compensation in the UK. Taking advantage of the well-documented change in UK monetary policy to adopt inflation targeting, we estimate our model using nominal and inflation-linked Treasury bond data from the UK from 1985 to 2007. We find that this model can account for the term structure of inflation compensation in the nominal yield curve by generating regime-dependent conditional expectations of future inflation.
Working Paper
How did we get to inflation targeting and where do we go now? a perspective from the U.S. experience
This paper advances the hypothesis that the transition from there-is-little-central-banks-can-do-to-control-inflation to inflation targeting occurred because central banks, especially the Federal Reserve, demonstrated that central banks can control inflation rather than a consequence of marked improvement in the professions understanding of how monetary policy controls inflation. As consequence, monetary theorists and central bankers have returned to a Phillips curve framework for formulating and evaluating the monetary policy. I suggest that the return to the Phillips curve framework ...