The European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England: is the Taylor Rule an useful benchmark for the last decade?

The Taylor rule has been used in many studies in order to analyse the monetary policies. In my work I focus on the Euro era and compare the ECB with other two central banks, the Fed and the BoE. A very interesting result comes out from the analysis: it seems that these central banks do not observe the inflation course before deciding about the variation of the interest rates. This result can be linked to two ideas: firstly, the use of stationary time series drops out the significance of the inflation gap as regressor; secondly, a really forward looking central bank focuses on other macroeconomic leading indicators instead of examining the realized or expected inflation gap.