The slight slowdown of consumer price infl ation in Germany in November does not yet constitute the beginning of lower infl ation rates. Even though energy prices are dragging infl ation, producer prices have drastically increased in the past year. Our estimates indicate that infl ation rates...

We develop a structural vector autoregressive framework that combines external instruments and heteroskedasticity for identification of monetary policy shocks. We show that exploiting both types of information sharpens structural inference, allows testing the relevance and exogeneity condition...