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Price-Level Targeting and Stabilization Policy: A Review

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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.

JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31, E32, E5, E52

DOI: https://doi.org/10.34989/sdp-2007-11