Over the past fifteen years, a significant number of industrialized and middle-income countries have adopted inflation targeting as a framework for monetary policymaking. As the name suggests, in such inflation-targeting regimes, the central bank is responsible for achieving a publicly announced target for the inflation rate. While the objective of controlling inflation enjoys wide support among both academic experts and policymakers, and while the countries that have followed this model have generally experienced good macroeconomic outcomes, many important questions about inflation targeting remain.

In Inflation Targeting, a distinguished group of contributors explores the many underexamined dimensions of inflation targeting—its potential, its successes, and its limitations—from both a theoretical and an empirical standpoint, and for both developed and emerging economies. The volume opens with a discussion of the optimal formulation of inflation-targeting policy and continues with a debate about the desirability of such a model for the United States. The concluding chapters discuss the special problems of inflation targeting in emerging markets, including the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary.

The NBER Macroeconomics Annual provides a forum for important debates in contemporary macroeconomics and major developments in the theory of macroeconomic analysis and policy that include leading economists from a variety of fields. The papers and accompanying discussions in NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2009 address how heterogeneous beliefs interact with equilibrium leverage and potentially lead to leverage cycles, the validity of alternative hypotheses about the reason for the recent increase in foreclosures on residential mortgages, the credit rating crisis, quantitative implications for the evolution of the U.S. wage distribution, and noisy business cycles.

The twenty-eighth edition of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual continues its tradition of featuring theoretical and empirical research on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics. As in previous years, this volume not only addresses recent developments in macroeconomics, but also takes up important policy-relevant questions and opens new debates that will continue for years to come. The first two papers in this year’s issue tackle fiscal and monetary policy, asking how interest rates and inflation can remain low despite fiscal policy behavior that appears inconsistent with a monetary policy regime focused only on inflation and output and not on fiscal balances as recently observed in the U.S. The third examines the implications of reference-dependent preferences and moral hazard in employment fluctuations in the labor market. The fourth paper addresses money and inflation, analyzing the long run inflation rate, the coexistence of money with pledgeable and money-like assets, and why inflation did not increase in response to business-cycle fluctuations in productivity. And the fifth looks at the stock market and how it relates to the real economy. The final chapter discusses the large and public shift towards more expansionary monetary policy that has recently occurred in Japan.

The twenty-ninth edition of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual continues its tradition of featuring theoretical and empirical research on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics. Two papers in this year’s issue deal with recent economic performance: one analyzes the evolution of aggregate productivity before, during, and after the Great Recession, and the other characterizes the factors that have contributed to slow economic growth following the Great Recession. Another pair of papers tackles the role of information in business cycles. Other contributions address how assumptions about sluggish nominal price adjustment affect the consequences of different monetary policy rules and the role of business cycles in the long-run decline in the share of employment in middle-wage jobs. The final chapter discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the elimination of physical currency.