The Fed's new communication strategy: is it stealth inflation targeting? Or is it simply enhanced transparency?

Business Economics, July, 2008 by Michael Woodford

(6) For empirical evidence of the effects of the BOJ's communications policy, see Oda and Ueda (2005).

REFERENCES

Bernanke, Ben S. 2007. "Federal Reserve Communications," a speech at the Cato Institute 25th Annual Monetary Conference, Washington, D.C., November 14.

Bernanke, Ben S., Thomas Laubach, Frederic S. Mishkin, and Adam S. Posen. 1999. Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the International Experience, Princeton University Press.

Fracasso, Andrea, Hans Genberg. and Charles Wyplosz. 2003. "How Do Central Banks Write? An Evaluation of Inflation Targeting Central Banks,"' Geneva Reports on the World Economy, Special Report 2. Centre for Economic Policy Research.

Mishkin, Frederic S. 2007. "The Federal Reserves Enhanced Communication Strategy and the Science of Monetary Policy," a speech to the Undergraduate Economics Association, M.I.T., Cambridge, Mass., November 29.

Oda, Nobuyuki and Kazuo Ueda, 2005. "The Effects of the Bank of Japan's Zero Interest Rate Commitment and Quantitative Monetary Easing on the Yield Curve: A Macro-Finance Approach," Bank of Japan working paper no. 05-E-6, April.

Woodford, Michael. 2005. "Central-Bank Communication and Policy Effectiveness," in The Greenspan Era: Lessons for the Future. Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

Woodford, Michael. 2007. "The Case for Forecast Targeting as a Monetary Policy Strategy," Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall:3-24.

This article is based on comments delivered at the 2008 Allied Social Sciences Association session, "Recent and Prospective Developments in Monetary Policy Transparency and Communications: A Global Perspective." The session was sponsored by the National Association for Business Economics. This article was originally published on www.VoxEu.org.

Michael Woodford is the John Bates Clark Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University. His first academic appointment was at Columbia in 1984, after which he held positions at the University of Chicago and Princeton University before returning to Columbia in 2004. He has been a MacArthur Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Mass.), and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London). In 2007, he was awarded the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics. His primary research interests are in macroeconomic theory and monetary policy. He serves on both the Economic Advisory Panel and the Monetary Policy Panel for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and frequently lectures at and consults for other central banks and policy institutions as well. He received his A.B. from the University of Chicago, his J.D. from Yale Law School, and his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.