The author surveys recent articles on the costs and benefits of price-level targeting versus inflation targeting, focusing on the benefits and costs of price-level targeting as a tool for stabilization policy. He reviews papers that examine how price-level targeting affects the short-run trade-off between output and inflation variability by influencing expectations of future inflation. The author looks at the implications of this argument for assigning an objective based on price-level targeting to a central bank that is unable to commit to its future policies. He discusses some recent papers that examine how price-level targeting can help to avoid the zero-bound problem, and papers that examine the incentives created by price-level targeting to change the degree of indexation of private contracts.
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Paper provided by Bank of Canada in its series Discussion Papers with number
07-11.
Find related papers by JEL classification: E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy
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