JEL Classification: E31, E52, E58This article studies the effects of inflation targeting (IT) on relative price variability (RPV) using a data set of twenty countries comprising both targeters and nontargeters. We find that a decline in mean inflation after IT adoption is not necessarily associated with a similar fall in RPV and that what matters most for the structural changes in RPV is the initial inflation regime prior to the adoption of IT rather than IT adoption itself. IT adoption impacts the shape of the underlying relationship between inflation and RPV in countries with initially high inflation rates, moving it from monotonic to the U-shaped profile observed consistently for countries with low-inflation regimes. The minimum point of this U-shaped curve is indicative of the public's expectations of inflation and is very close to the announced target for inflation in most of the countries we study.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.