Trade Openness and Exchange Rate Regimes

The paper evaluates the net welfare gains of inflation targeting over a fixed exchange rate as a function of a country's trade openness, using a multisectoral structural model calibrated to Chile. For most calibrations with separable preferences, net welfare gains are increasing in trade openness. The reason is that in more open economies terms of trade shocks, which favor inflation targeting, become quantitatively more important, while price markup shocks in the imperfectly competitive nontradables sector, which favor exchange rate targeting, become less important. The most important exception is heavily indebted countries, where net welfare gains are decreasing in trade openness.     

Why Is Canada's Price Level So Predictable?

This paper draws attention to the fact that the price level in Canada—which is an inflation targeter—has strayed little from the path it would have taken had inflation never wandered off the 2% target since its introduction and has tended to revert to that path after temporary deviations. Econometric analysis using Bayesian estimation suggests that a low probability can be assigned to explaining this behavior by mutually offsetting shocks. More plausible is the assumption that inflation expectations and interest rates are determined in a way that is consistent with an element of price‐level‐path targeting.