What Does the Bundesbank Target?

Ben S. Bernanke and Ilian Mihov ()

No 5764, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Although its primary ultimate objective is price stability, the Bundesbank has drawn a distinction between its money-focus strategy and the inflation targeting approach recently adopted by a number of central banks. We show that, holding constant the current forecast of inflation, German monetary policy responds very little to changes in forecasted money growth; we conclude that the Bundesbank is much better described as an inflation targeter than as a money targeter. An additional contribution of the paper is to apply the structural VAR methods of Bernanke and Mihov (1995) to determine the optimal indicator of German monetary policy: We find that the Lombard rate has historically been a good policy indicator, although the use of the call rate as an indicator cannot be statistically rejected.

Date: 1996-09
Note: EFG ME
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w5764.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
Journal Article: What does the Bundesbank target? (1997)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:5764

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w5764
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().