This article assesses the importance of the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates for the conduct of monetary policy. The article employs a small, forward-looking model developed by Fuhrer and Moore. The model is simulated under several policy rules that involve either high or low inflation...

Recent research has clarified the nature of measurement errors in U.S. price indexes. Changes in the quality of goods create severe problems. Laspeyres-type indexes suffer from substitution bias from one good to another and from one type of outlet to another. Available evidence suggests that the...

We examine a concerted debt reduction deal between a sovereign debtor, a private creditor, and an official creditor, who insures the deposits of the commercial bank. Our results show that a weakening of the financial position of the commercial bank reduces the contribution of the commercial bank...

The case for an independent central bank is becoming increasingly accepted. This new orthodoxy is based on three foundations: the success of the Bundesbank and the German economy over the past forty years; the theoretical academic literature on the inflationary bias of discretionary...

This paper investigates whether an asymmetry is present in the Granger-causal relationship between output and a set of interest rates and their spreads, across expansionary and contractionary business cycle phases in post 1950 U.S. Non-structural VAR models of monthly industrial production and...

Using cross-country data, we review the empirical evidence concerning long-term labor and total factor productivity growth. We find that the conclusions one can draw from cross-country data are surprisingly modest. Nevertheless, we confirm the crucial role for physical capital accumulation in...