Inflation targeting and output-inflation tradeoffs

Abstract

This article assesses whether the adoption of inflation targeting (IT) helps reduce the output-inflation tradeoff. We address the self-selection problem of IT policy adoption by the endogenous switching regressions, and show that the output-inflation tradeoffs are significantly lower in IT countries not only over the whole sample but also across the developed and developing country subsamples. In addition, we also find strong evidence supporting the positive selection hypothesis, i.e., countries have higher probability of adopting IT are exactly those who benefit more (larger reduction of output-inflation tradeoff) from the implementation of IT. Additional results reveal that economies with higher trade openness, lower financial openness, and less flexible exchange rate regime are associated with larger tradeoff between output and inflation, but the effects are only statistically significant in the IT regime.