All central banks manage the supply of money and credit in their countries, increasing and decreasing them as needed to provide what economies need to keep growing. The way central banks typically handle that job involves short-term interest rates. But when inflation is low, central banks can't use their usual methods to get money and credit into an economy that needs it. Several essays in this volume describe the work of economists who have investigated problems that central banks might have when inflation gets low. Other essays investigate related questions such as whether an economy suffers when it moves from high inflation to low inflation, what the costs of inflation are to economic welfare, and whether a little bit of inflation can actually be good for economic growth.
Introduction; 1. The welfare cost of inflation in the presence of inside money Scott Freeman, Espen R. Henriksen and Finn E. Kydland, Commentary Wilbur John Coleman II and Tony Yates; 2. An open-economy model of endogenous price flexibility Michael B. Devereux, Commentary David K. Backus and Michael Dotsey; 3. Efficient inflation targets for distorted dynamic economies Costas Azariadis and Raphael W. K. Lam, Commentary Eric O'N. Fisher and Marvin Goodfriend; 4. Inflation and welfare in models with trading frictions Guillaume Rocheteau and Randall Wright, Commentary James Bullard and Shouyong Shi; 5. Good versus bad deflation: lessons from the gold standard era Michael D. Bordo, John Landon-Lane and Angela Redish, Commentary François R. Velde; 6. Monetary policy orientation in times of low inflation Jürgen von Hagen and Boris Hofmann, Commentary Jack Selody and Pierre L. Siklos; 7. Observations on disinflation in transition economies Paul Wachtel and Iikka Korhonen, Commentary Werner Hermann; 8. Inflation and financial market performance: what have we learned in the last ten years? John Boyd and Bruce Champ, Commentary Nicola Cetorelli and Peter L. Rousseau.
