This Paper comments on the role of the Monetary Dialogue in the context of an evolving monetary policy. The discussion is conducted in terms of the adoption of forward guidance on interest rates by the European Central Bank (ECB), the ECB’s model choice and data revision policies in inflation...

This paper briefly assesses the effectiveness of the different non-standard monetary policy tools in the Euro Area. Its main focus is on the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) Programme which is praised by some as the ECB’s “magic wand”. Moreover, it discloses further possible unintended...

This paper comments on the pros and cons of exit strategies. The focus is on the impact on the Euro area economy of the exit from unconventional monetary policies (UMP) by the Fed, which appears to be the first central bank to lay out an exiting path. In this context, it discusses the issue of...

Relations between economic variables are often characterized by a situation where initial conditions and the past realizations of economic variables matter. I.e. past (transient) exogenous disturbances and past states of the economic system do have an influence on the current economic relations....

The purpose of this article is to deliver new estimates of the sacrifice ratio of Euro area countries. A high sacrifice ratio means a large loss of gross domestic product (GDP) or employment for a given reduction in inflation. In order to estimate the cost of adjustments in inflation rates by...

This paper investigates the relationship between global liquidity and commodity and food prices applying a global cointegrated vector-autoregressive model. We use different measures of global liquidity and various indices of commodity and food prices for the period 1980–2011. Our results...

A non-linear model is applied where suddenly strong spurts of exports occur when changes of the exchange rate go beyond a zone of inaction. We call the latter a “play” area – analogous to mechanical play and implement an algorithm describing path-dependent play-hysteresis into a regression...

This paper examines the contemporaneous relationship between the exchange rate regime and structural economic reforms for a sample of CEEC/CIS transition countries. We investigate empirically whether structural reforms are complements or substitutes for monetary commitment in the attempt to...

This study puts the monetary transmission process in the eurozone between 2003 and 2011 under closer scrutiny. For this purpose, we investigate the interest rate pass-through from money market to various loan rates for up to twelve countries of the European Monetary Union. Applying different...

Monetary policy rules have been considered as fundamental protection against inflation. However, empirical evidence for a correlation between rules and inflation is relatively weak. In this paper, we first discuss likely causes for this weak link and present the argument that monetary commitment...