TY - BOOK ID - 80820534 TI - The role of policymakers in business cycle fluctuations AU - Granato, Jim AU - Wong, M C Sunny PY - 2006 SN - 9780511510540 9780521860161 9780521390767 0511169280 9780511169281 0511510543 0521860164 0521390761 1107156432 1280449233 0511168853 051116789X 0511312547 0511168411 PB - Cambridge Cambridge University Press DB - UniCat KW - Economic policy. KW - Business cycles. KW - Inflation (Finance) KW - Finance KW - Natural rate of unemployment KW - Economic cycles KW - Economic fluctuations KW - Cycles KW - Economic nationalism KW - Economic planning KW - National planning KW - State planning KW - Economics KW - Planning KW - National security KW - Social policy KW - Social Sciences KW - Political Science UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:80820534 AB - This book's central theme is that a policymaker's role is to enhance the public's ability to coordinate their price information, price expectations, and economic activities. This role is fulfilled when policymakers maintain inflation stability. Inflation persists less when an implicit or explicit inflation target is met. Granato and Wong argue that inflation persistence is reduced when the public substitutes the prespecified inflation target for past inflation. A by-product of this co-ordination process is greater economic stability. In particular, inflation stability contributes to greater economic output stability, including the potential for the simultaneous reduction of both inflation and output variability - inflation-output co-stabilization (IOCS). Granato and Wong use historical, formal, and applied statistical analysis of business-cycle performance in the United States for the 1960 to 2000 period. They find that during periods when policymakers emphasize inflation stability, inflation uncertainty and persistence were reduced. ER -